Objective: Gain entry to your dwelling without having to a) wake up the neighbor or b) explain to a cop that your ID is just behind the door you're trying to jimmy.

*My* Solution (your mileage may vary): Perform a preliminary port-scan before proceeding to more intensive penetration testing. Start with all the doors... my main door is around back, and it leads to the three apartments in the house I live in. It happens to be unlatched (rare, as it has a hydraulic ram to close it and automatically locks) however the inner door to my apartment is locked tight. I've no credit card handy to attempt to pop the lock, however it would be futile--I've tried before.

On to the front door; it's a shaky old thing that lacks a locking knob, has two cheap-o mini-deadbolts and a sliding chain lock to hold it tight. At first try it's shut and locked, no luck here. The two windows to the apartment are also unhelpful, one is locked and the other has an AC unit bolted in.

Back to the front door. I shouldered it pretty firmly and was surprised when it gave! Turns out the wood has swollen with the humidity to where only 1 of the 2 little deadbolts catch, and only by a small amount. So I'm left with a sliding chain lock between me and bed. The chain lock is installed correctly though, and the door must be closed for it to be locked or unlocked. fuck

Final solution: Scavenge, fortunately there's a construction site in the back yard (they're building a new garage) and I manage to find some twine. I cut off about 6' (with a utility knife I found) and tie one end around the end of the chain, on the little knob piece that slides in the rail and actually locks the door. Then I run the twine up the inside of the door (inside the apartment, same side as the lock), over the top, and down the front. Pull the door to where it almost latches and start tugging on the twine. Amazingly it only took about 10 seconds of fiddling to pop the chain out of it's rail, and voila!

Maybe later I'll post about a string-&-baseball injection attack on a large leaf-server (ie: Tree) which holds (another) toy helicopter problem.

Since the source code I had on my laptop was within a Virtual Machine, I thought it would be a good solution to make an encrypted filesystem big enough for the VM, and only mount it when I wanted to work.

Here's my requirements:
- Encrypted FS that is (un)mountable whenever need be
- Passphrase to mount the filesystem
- 30GB of storage within the filesystem, to accomodate the 30GB VM disk.

First, we create a file that will become the filesystem. Using dd we make it the size we want:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=30 of=/home/steve/devel_image

Here's what the attributes mean:
if is the input file since we're making an empty file we'll set if to /dev/zero, which will give us an empty file of zeros
of is the output file, or the file you want to create. Here I'm telling it to make a file called devel_image in my /home/steve folder
bs is the bytes, but I like to call it the bucket size, since the way it is used is to declare your unit size. Here 1G means we wants 1GB chunks, or buckets. You can give it different units, 1M, 5G, whatever.
count is the number of buckets you wish to use. Since we want a 30GB file, and are using 1G buckets, we'll need 30 of them to make 30GB.

This makes a 30GB file called devel_image in my home directory, and takes some time to complete (30 gigs is kinda big, y'know?)

Next we setup a loopback device (which will make the system see the file as a drive). using losetup you can create the device, and you can even add encryption at this point--however it's becomming deprecated, and better to handle the encryption on it's own (as cryptoloop support will be removed from the kernel at some point

Shred can be used to wipe files, or whole drives. To wipe a drive, the following parameters are good to know
-z After shredding, one more pass will be made to write all zeros to the drive, not necessary, but it hides the fact that the disk has been shredded
-v Display messages about progress, which is handy since shredding a drive takes a fair deal of time
-n x x is the number of passes you wish to make. 3 is a good number, and if you use the -z option it will be 3 shredding passes followed by a 4th pass to zero out all the data

Put it together and pass it a drive to wipe:
shred -zvn 3 /dev/sda

And voila, all your private data goes bye-bye