Ranok's Ramblings » Projects

libAnomaly GCC4 Update

ranok — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:36:19 +0000

During my thesis research, I came across a very useful library for machine learning and anomaly detection: libAnomaly. While it hasn’t been updated in years, the papers published (see site for list) are of interest to me. When I attempted to compile the library to play around with, the build failed due to GCC4 being more strict than previous versions, I found a number of other posts from people trying to build the library with similar problems, so I thought I’d fix the errors (there are still plenty of warnings) and upload it so others wouldn’t have to duplicate the effort. You can download the source from here.

Peace and chow,

Jacob

Long Time No Post

ranok — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:56:33 +0000

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here, and to my devout readers I apoligize. As many of you know, this has been my last semester of my undergraduate studies, so I have been very busy over the past few months. This post will hopefully act as a dump of what I’ve been up to and what I will be doing until my next post.

Things I did:

Developed a method for calling parts of functions to minimize/obfuscate programs
Worked with Ryan on OSP to get a web based cluster management system integrated into the cluster administration page
Played with return-to-libc attacks and got them working on the latest version of Ubuntu Linux

Things on the horizon:

Working full-time for AIS
Traveling to Iceland for 3 weeks
Working on a computer security textbook
Running a marathon in August

It is very weird to me to think that today is the last day of classes for me as a traditional full-time student. I’ve been going to school since I was 5 and it is very weird to think that come August I will not be returning to the classroom as my primary past-time. I am excited to travel and get away from the normal swing of things for a while to reflect on the new changes in my life, and excited to begin working, especially due to the extra leisure time after work.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Open Server Platform Version 0.3 Released!

ranok — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:14:27 +0000

Today I finally got around to going through and testing the RC for version 0.3 of Open Server Platform. Everything seemed to work as planned, except for a few known issues that will be fixed in the next release, which should be coming down the pipe soon.

Improvements:

Added replication nodes to increase fail-safe reliability
Added commands to the administration console to stop and live migrate applications
Can use configuration files to assist in the start up of OSP
Many bug fixes and documentation updates
The HTTPd servlet example now supports large files and the HEAD command

So, please check it out and let me know what you think!

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Back in the Groove

ranok — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:23:12 +0000

After taking off the afternoon due to a migraine, and napping for a few hours until it passed, I was looking over some old projects, and decided to get motivated to work on my various Erlang hackery projects. I checked out a fresh copy of Open Server Platform on my new computer, and decided to hack on it some more. There are a number of loose ends I’d like to tie up before the 0.3 release, but, before I could get down to coding, SVN get my so frustrated that I could no longer deal with it and switched to git, creating a new repository on Github. I will keep the Google Code repository the ‘defacto’ repository, where the safer code gets committed, but use Github for the more bleeding edge development due to it’s simplified branching and merging (among other things).

In the new git setup, I have two branches (aside from master, which follows the SVN repository): otp and no-otp. The no-otp version is currently the stable code that runs just fine, but doesn’t take advantage of Erlang’s OTP framework. The otp branch is the more cutting edge OTP aware version, which I hope to fully migrate to soon. With full support for OTP, I should be able to use an already existing distribution platform, and more battle tested redundancy.

This evening, I fixed a long standing bug in the example HTTPd where the server would crash when opening large files due to a shortcut I took with first implementing the server. Originally, the server would read the entire file into a string and then send that to the client, as you can probably see, there is a problem when the server tries to read in a 3.9 GB file (my test file). Now, my servlet takes a much more sane approach, read in the file 1 kilobyte at time, sending that to the client before reading more. This new approach works perfectly, though I had to add some messiness for handling CGI/PHP files and different MIME types. I also added support for the HTTP HEAD command.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Git and Wiki Wide Web

ranok — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:50:32 +0000

I admit it, I’ve finally jumped on the Git bandwagon. After toying with SVN and Darcs, I was convinced when I saw a screen-cast about branching and merging and how it makes the kind of random, skitzo programming that I do very easy and very maintainable. I started using it at work to keep track of some files as a test and finally bit the bullet and signed up for a GitHub account. Once I had gotten setup, I made a few repositories to upload some code I had made for my high school senior project, code that I haven’t looked at in years and probably never will again. Then I decided to share something a bit more exciting, Wiki Wide Web‘s bleeding edge source code. After some quick review to ensure I cleared the code of any hard coded passwords, I committed the source.

One thing I like about putting your code on a site like GitHub is that it guilts you into cleaning it up. If you hope that people are going to see it, then you feel slightly pushed to make an effort to clean it up. That pressure lead me to add some installation instructions and a make file for the Firefox extension, and clean up some code.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Time Really Flies!

ranok — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:16:12 +0000

I just made the discovery the other day that I’ve been on co-op for over a month, and time shows no sign of slowing down! For those of you who haven’t had the delight of hearing me expound on how much I love my co-op, I have really found a place where I fit in, am challenged everyday, and don’t have to do any tedious work, just cutting edge security research!

Anyways, now that I’ve gotten that over with, I was up at Clarkson the other week for the career fair, and I went up the night before for the COSI meeting. That evening a new member introduced a new project to add easy to use AI libraries to the Processing language. I thought that is might be a good idea to take a look at AI stuff before I take the class when I return, so I’m excited to dive in and learn what I can! Also, after learning how little I really know about virtualization, and seeing how popular it is, I thought I’d like to jump on the bandwagon and learn about it. Last night I bought Running Xen and its sister book The Definitive Guide to Xen and I proposed (through Zach) that to learn more about it, I’d like to form a rag tag groups of hackers and write our own, open-source virtualization application, whatever that entails. I hope to post soon as I start learning what I’m in for.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Next Semester Projects

ranok — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 13:33:03 +0000

Seeing as I’m going to have no homework for the next semester (!!) I’m hoping to get some more projects underway in my down time. I’m going to use this post as a dump of my current interests and as a road-map for where I want to go in the next few months. I’m sure this will change as time goes on, but I need to start somewhere!

Projects in progress:

FANG – I’d like to polish the multi-processing system, add namespaces, and tie it into the Erlang stdlib. Also add macros (real macros!) to FANG.
OSP – I’m going to be using OSP as a basis for LadieBug (mentioned below). This will hopefully give me perspective into what I should work on in OSP to make it more friendly for development.

New projects:

I’d like to take advantage of LaunchPad’s ‘Personal Package Archive’ system to host a few of my own Ubuntu packages, namely a more up-to-date version of Erlang’s OTP system.
LadieBug – To take advantage of OSP’s distributed data store, I’d like to implement my own caching, recursive DNS server that would be both DNSSEC and DNSCurve compliant and would share the cache over the entire cluster, making it more scalable and reduce the number of needless queries.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment, if anyone would like to help me on any of these, feel free to comment below and we can get in touch.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

FANG Version 0.1 Released!

ranok — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:46:39 +0000

I spent my birthday yesterday polishing up FANG for it’s initial release to the public, after adding some error handling so it would fail more gracefully and adding the ability to parse in files and save the current state of the system to a file for later retrieval. I also did away with the rather hideous use of the process dictionary and moved to an auto balanced tree structure for storing the data.

Over break, I’m hoping to add enough other features to warrant a 0.2 release, which I’d like to have support for soft-processes (ala Erlang), multi-node support and transactional shared memory (using Mnesia). I would also like to add permissions and process jailing for the soft-processes to allow for running untrusted code in a sandbox of sorts.

I’ve started a very simple (and ugly) site to put my progress and releases. You can check it out here and please comment with suggestions or other features you’d think would be a valuable addition. Good luck on everyone’s finals and projects! Have a wonderful break!

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Lulz of the Day: Ark

ranok — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:19:59 +0000

Well, it’s about time for there to be another Lulz of the Day! Today we’ll be lulzing about Ark, my IRC anti-floodbot script. As an IRCop on a network, I am constantly figthing floodbots who join, /msg everyone on the network some spam and then disconnect. I figured that there must be a way to stop them, and so I diligently started working on Ark. Ark is a perlscript that connects to an IRC server as an IRCop and joins the most popular channels (which you specify). It then waits quietly, bidding its time until it gets /msg’d. Once it receives a message, it springs into action, checking the received message against a list of regexs. If any of them match, it will /kill the bot and resume its slumber.

This very simple, yet oddly helpful script can be downloaded from my code site

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Lulz of the Day: Cesspool

ranok — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:09:47 +0000

While cleaning up my hard drive, I’ve come across many old projects that are pretty interesting, and I thought I’d start a mini-series of these little pearls (perls?) I come across as I find them. Without further ado, lets start with our first Lulz of the Day (LOTD)!

Cesspool

As many of you know, I’m in the systems biology class this semester, and recently we spent a week or so looking at the genetic algorithm and its applications. I immediately began hacking on a genetic algorithm to ‘breed’ a Corewars warrior. The code for this is pretty simple, and still needs much revision, but it’s bred some programs that are pretty good. I’m going to run it a few times and try to put together some statistics in the next few days, but for now, you can download the source and play around with it as you wish. Basically what it does is:

Generates some initial warriors with random commands and arguments
Pits the warriors against themselves in battle using the corewars-cmd command
Ranks them by their scores
Cross breeds the best 20% of the population, and mutate the rest (with 5% chance of mutation)
Repeat from step 2 for the number of generations.

Todo:

Modify the cross-breeding algorithm so it doesn’t just append one program to the other, but mixes up the commands of both
Small bug fixes with the scraper for the corewars-cmd results
Run a number of times, and then pit the best generated warriors against some made by humans

Peace and lulz,

Ranok