Meet the deck

Introduction

We live in an increasingly digital world. The number of interconnected devices in our world is constantly on the rise. Businesses worldwide rely on computers, tablets, smartphones, and other digital devices in order to compete in a global economy. Many businesses are necessarily connected to the Internet. Newly connected systems can come under attack by malicious persons and/or organizations in a matter of minutes. Because of this, the demand for information security (infosec) professionals is strong. Penetration testers (pentesters) are some of the most sought after infosec people.

Chances are that if you are reading this book, you already know what penetration testing entails. Penetration testing (pentesting) is authorized hacking performed at the request of a client in order to ascertain how easily their digital security may be penetrated and steps that should be taken to improve their security posture. The need for penetration testing has led to the creation of a number of specialized Linux distributions. Up until now, these custom Linux distributions have been created almost exclusively to be run by a single penetration tester using an Intel-based (or AMD-based) desktop or laptop computer.

Fear Not

Before getting started with the main topic of this chapter, I wanted to provide you with some assurances up front. This book is written under the assumption that you have an understanding of general penetration testing concepts and basic Linux usage. Everything else you need to know will be provided in this book. You need not be an elite hacker (but if you are, then good for you!) or advanced Linux user/administrator to get something out of this book. Most importantly, absolutely no hardware knowledge is assumed. While information will be provided for those wishing to create their own custom circuit boards and such, most of what is described in this book is also commercially available.

If you are new to the idea of hardware hacking, you can choose the level to which you want to push yourself. You can simply play it safe and buy commercially available BeagleBone capes (expansion boards that plug into the BeagleBone directly; see http://beagleboard.org/cape for more information). If you want to get your feet wet, you might solder four wires to a commercially available XBee adapter (such as this Adafruit adapter (http://www.adafruit.com/products/126)) to create a mini-cape as described later in this book. Information is provided for advanced users who want to etch their own custom circuit boards. You can do as little or as much hardware hacking as you wish without affecting your ability to perform powerful penetration tests as described in this book.

The Deck

The Deck, the custom Linux distribution described in this book, breaks the traditional model by providing penetration testers with an operating system that runs on low-power ARM-based systems developed by the nonprofit BeagleBoard.org Foundation (these will be described more fully in the next chapter, but see http://beagleboard.org/Getting%20Started if you just cannot wait till then). This permits devices running The Deck to be easily hidden and opens up the possibility of running off of battery power. At the time of this writing, The Deck contained over 1600 packages, making it extremely useful for penetration testing. The Deck is extremely flexible and is equally adept at being used as a traditional desktop, dropbox, or remote hacking drone.

Devices Running The Deck

All of the devices shown in Figure 1.1 are running The Deck. At the time of this writing, The Deck runs on three devices in the Beagle family: the BeagleBoard-xM, BeagleBone, and BeagleBone Black edition. These boards will be described more fully in the next chapter. You can also find out more about them at the BeagleBoard Web site (http://beagleboard.org). For now, we will describe them as low-power boards based on ARM Cortex-A8 processors running at up to 1 GHz. Despite providing desktop-like performance, these devices require a fraction of the power of an Intel-based or AMD-based system. Even when driving a 7 in. touchscreen (such as this one: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBone_LCD7) and external wireless adapter, a 10 W (2 A at 5 V) power adapter is more than sufficient. Compare this with triple- and quadruple-digit wattages found in laptop and desktop systems.

Penetration Testing Tools

The Deck contains a large number of penetration testing tools. The intention is to have every tool you would likely need available without the trouble of downloading additional packages. Installing new packages to a hacking drone during a penetration test ranges from difficult to impossible. Some desktop-oriented penetration testing Linux distributions suffer from having many old packages that are no longer in common use. Each package included in The Deck was evaluated before inclusion. Anything deemed redundant to a new package was left out. Some of the more frequently used tools are introduced here.

Wireless networking has become extremely prevalent. As a result, many penetration tests start with the need to crack a wireless network. The aircrack-ng suite is included in The Deck for this purpose. The airodump-ng utility is used for basic packet captures and analysis. Captured packets can then be fed to aircrack-ng in order to crack network encryption. Screenshots of airodump-ng and aircrack-ng are provided in Figures 1.2 and 1.3, respectively. More details on using the aircrack-ng suite will be provided in future chapters.

Even in cases where a client is not using wireless networking, the aircrack-ng suite can be useful for detecting and possibly cracking any rogue access points on the client's network. A very easy to use point-and-click wireless cracking tool known as Fern WiFi Cracker is also included with The Deck. A screenshot showing a successful crack with Fern is shown in Figure 1.4. Those newer to penetration testing might find Fern easier to use. Due to their interactive nature, neither aircrack-ng nor Fern is suitable for use in a hacking drone. For this reason, the Scapy Python tool (http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/) is included in The Deck.

Regardless of whether they are from wired or wireless networks, network packets are potentially interesting to the penetration tester. The Deck includes Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/) for capturing and analyzing captured packets. Nmap (http://nmap.org/), a standard network mapping tool, is also provided for identifying services and hosts on a target network. A collection of vulnerability scanners and a powerful exploitation framework known as Metasploit (http://www.metasploit.com/) are also bundled in the standard version of The Deck. Some of these tools are presented in Figure 1.5.

Metasploit is a very popular tool maintained by Rapid 7 (http://www.rapid7.com/). Numerous books, training classes, and videos covering Metasploit...