Red Team Summit
This week was one of my favorite weeks in a long time. We had a very successful 9th annual Red Team Summit (but actually our 8th, due to Covid cancelling our 2020 event), and all the work I’d been putting in over the past months paid off. Due to the nature of the event, I won’t really say a whole lot about it, but it has been my favorite conference since the first one, and I’m so happy I get to be a part of it.
I also hosted my first sponsored conference social event for Room 641A and got to talk to people about what I’m working on. I don’t know if it led to any actual leads or not, which might make it more difficult to justify doing it again in the future unless I start bringing in more consistent income, but it was really cool to get to do that.
I was also given a surprise customized gift that made me feel super appreciated. Others involved with the conference/community made this customized ifixit kit for me, with a 1 of 1 embroidered version of my social media logo (which itself is from my first single, Red Team). For everyone involved in this gift, I appreciate you all more than you could know, even if I’m a little awkward about showing it.
DNS Data Collection
In addition to Red Team Summit, I have been working on a lot of DNS related software work. I built a simple zone diffing tool in python that generates diffs day over day for a given TLD zone, and also built an automated process to fetch zone files from CZDS and streaming decompress them to an s3 bucket.
The streaming Gzip decompression is cool, I didn’t really understand that it was possible but it was cool to try it out and get it working. Otherwise the .com zone in particular would be problematic, since it expands to over 22GB. Diffing the .com zone is also challenging since the diff requires comparing the before and after, which would naively require 44GB of memory. Instead, I’m doing a variation on a streaming diff to avoid loading each whole zone into memory. It’s not a perfect diff that could be applied with the patch tool, but it should help clarify what things are happening in the zones on a daily basis, without having to store many duplicates of the complete files.
Anyone have ideas on how to efficiently store timeseries data in a graph database? I’m constantly pushing the limit of my knowledge here 😅.
Interesting Links
- PROTOCOL - TELNET - My video on telnet released this past week. I didn’t post about it or anything, but here it is.
- Mess With The Best - A track I put out I guess more than a week ago at this point. I’m going to publish this one to streaming platforms, but soundcloud got it first.
- ATProto Isn’t What You Think - A post about ATProto, what decentralized means, and the value of the Personal Data Server.
- It is as if you were on your phone - A fun site that draws attention to the patterns that we tend to exhibit while using our phones, and the pressure to be on them all the time. It reminds me of The Quiet Place Project, except almost in the exact opposite direction.
Upcoming Projects
- Defcon Call for Music/Tracks - Still working on it. Need to sit down and really focus on it a bit to get some progress on it, and collect some soundclips to use to really frame the concept.