Saving Data From a Failed Laptop

 DIY, Technology  No Responses »
Mar 022012
 

As a rule, I don’t help family and friends with their computer needs! That said, I make a couple of exceptions to that rule, one of which is my Mom. A couple of weeks ago, she called me complaining that her laptop was randomly powering-down. I went over to have a look and decided the first thing to do was run a backup. A few minutes into the backup – BAM – no power … her laptop was “dead”. I made another three or four attempts to backup her data but each time the computer would loose power. She was already talking about buying a new computer and since the existing machine was about four years old, I agreed that new was a prudent choice.

When I asked how long it had been since she last backed up she told me it had been more than a year – YIKES!!! With hundreds of photos, email, documents and music at risk, I needed to find a way to save her data. My first thought was to remove her hard-disk and connect it to another computer via USB and just copy the data off. The problem with this idea was how to connect the drive! I recalled having a number of older USB drives in my hacking stash”. I decided that I would disassemble one of them and use its SATA-USB controller to connect the drive to the new laptop and simply copy the data to her new machine.

The drive I selected was a “Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB”. This drive was perfect because the SATA-USB controller didn’t require any type of external power as it takes power from the USB connection to power itself and the drive. This would make it really easy to hook up for this temporary assignment. Now that I had my drive selected, I needed to take it apart. This is where things get tricky.

To remove the SATA-USB controller you’ll need a screwdriver and something you can use to wedge into the case as you slowly work your way around the unit prying the edges apart. I used a stack of vinyl stickers but business cards, old hotel room keys or something similar would work.

Use a screwdriver to slowly and carefully pry the edge open. There are a lot of snap-connectors that hold the unit together. Be very careful, or the case will break! Once you manage to get it open, slip in a card to hold the unit apart.

Continue working around the unit VERY slowly and methodically. In order to remove the drive and controller assembly, you’ll have to pull the case apart on both the front and back sides.

When you’ve managed to get around both sides of the case, it should look something like this.

Now slip the center drive assembly out of the case.

Before we can remove the drive and access the controller there are three screws that have to be removed. Mine had a specialized star head that I didn’t have a bit for. To get around this I used a small flat-head bit that I could seat into the screw-head instead.

Now slide the drive out of the tray. That’s the controller protruding from the end of the drive.

FINALLY we have access to the controller. To remove the controller from the drive, firmly grasp the drive with one hand and the controller with the other and pull the controller off of the drive.

With my controller in-hand, now I need to remove the drive from the old laptop so I can install the controller and copy my data.

Now I connect the drive to the new laptop via USB and I can simply copy the data.

Until next time – GEEK OUT!

~GT~

   

 Posted by James L at 2:16 am

“Hack A Day” Hack with Greasemonkey

 DIY, Programming, Technology  5 Responses »
Feb 232012
 

If you have regular web sites that you visit, I bet I’m safe in guessing that at least one of them has something about it that you wish was different. You know what I mean — a different background color, larger fonts, menus in a different location, etc.

That site for me is “Hack A Day”. I love to see what other hackers are up to, but reading posts on the site with their green and white, small point text on a black background is killer on my eyes.

The great thing about the way the web works is that the page formatting is delivered to the browser right along with its contents. Once I have it, I can do with it as I please. That means I can change colors, fonts and just about any other stylistic or functional element on the page.

I’m an avid Firefox user and use a plugin called Greasemonkey that allows me to execute javascript on any page I choose so I can make the page look and/or act the way I want it to. I’m not, by any means, a javascript expert but it was a cinch to hack together a solution that allowed me to completely reformat the “Hack A Day” site to a more color neutral theme that is much less strenuous on my eyes.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Hackaday
// @namespace      http://localhost
// @description    Re-Theme hackaday.com
// @include        http://hackaday.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

// Let's change the body background to white
document.body.style.background = "#fff";

// Let's set our link hover, heading3 and paragraph settings
GM_addStyle("a:hover {background-color: transparent; border-bottom:0px;}");
GM_addStyle("h3 {color: #000;}");
GM_addStyle("p {color: #000; background-color: #fff; font-size: medium; line-height: normal}");

// Let's get rid of the border around the body text
GM_addStyle("#container {border-width: 0px;}");

// Change comment block backgrounds, colors and margins
GM_addStyle(".comment-body {background-color: #fff;}");
GM_addStyle("li.depth-2 {background-color: #fff;}");
GM_addStyle("li.depth-1 {background-color: #fff;}");
GM_addStyle(".comment-body {margin-left: 6px; margin-right: 6px;}");
GM_addStyle(".fn {color: #888;}");
GM_addStyle(".says {color: #888;}");
GM_addStyle(".cle h3 {color: #fff;}");

// Change the color of each link
var zElements = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.color="red";
}

// Change the color of each blogroll block
var zElements = document.getElementsByClassName("statsclass1");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.backgroundColor="#959595";
}
var zElements = document.getElementsByClassName("statsclass2");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.backgroundColor="#aaa";
}

// Change the color of each sharedaddy instance
var zElements = document.getElementsByClassName("sharedaddy");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.backgroundColor="#555";
   zElements[i].style.color="#fff";
}

// Change the sharedaddy title settings
var zElements = document.getElementsByClassName("sd-title");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.color="#fff";
   zElements[i].style.marginLeft="6px";
}

// Change the color of the comment counts
var zElements = document.getElementsByClassName("cat-item");
for (var i=0; i<zElements.length; i++) {
   zElements[i].style.color="#000";
}

Following is a before and after image that shows the transformation.

If you’re not a Firefox user, it may still be possible to achieve these same results with your browser of choice. Run a few Google searches on how to run Greasemonkey Scripts in your favorite browser and chances are you’ll find a way to make it work

Until next time – GEEK OUT!

~GT~

   

 Posted by James L at 3:38 am

Build a Vernam Cipher

 DIY, Programming, Science  No Responses »
Feb 152012
 

The current issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has an article on cryptography that outlines the use of the Vernam Cipher (aka One-time pad) to encrypt text by hand. What makes this technique interesting is its ease of implementation, but even more interesting than that is the fact that the Vernam Cipher is the only known method of encryption that is proven to be unbreakable when implemented/used correctly.

Sample One-Time Pad

So how does it work? In simple terms, each character from your text, known as plaintext, is encrypted by modular arithmetic with a character from a secret random key (or pad) of the same length as your plaintext. What results is a ciphertext. If the key is TRULY random and as large as the original text and has never been used then the ciphertext will be impossible to decrypt without knowing the key.

This got me to thinking — what would it take to create a web application to easily implement this encryption method for use on data that I wanted to store, let’s say, in my file based wiki!? Sure, there are numerous tools out there that one could leverage to encrypt text but this seemed like an interesting challenge and an excuse to learn a bit more about this cryptography method.

Before I proceed, let me just state that I am not a cryptographer and that the technique I devised for implementing my cipher is for informational purposes only!

The first step to encrypting our text is to convert our letters, and if we choose, our punctuation, to numbers so we can perform our modular arithmetic operations. The 2600 article described what is known as a straddling checkerboard which gives us numeric values for our non-number text characters while simultaneously introducing fractionation.

Example Straddling Checkerboard Grid

Using this particular implementation of the straddling checkerboard, Geek Tips would translate into 245527 18607. When encrypting by hand, it’s common to break the data up into smaller, easier to manage, groups. In this case we’ll use groups of five digits. Since our third group is less than five digits, we’ll fill in with zeros. Following this pattern, our string becomes, 24552 71860 70000, which is now ready for the next stage of the ciphering process which is to perform modular arithmetic with a key.

As I stated before, to implement this cipher properly, the key should be completely random and at least as long as our new string of numbers. For this example, let’s say our key is 20247 88641 30412. Now I subtract each digit in the key from each digit in the plaintext. If the result is less than zero, I add 10. For example, in the fifth column, I calculate 2 – 7, which results in -5. Because this is less than zero, I add 10 to get 5 as the final answer. In the first column, the result of 2 – 2 is 0, which is not less than zero, so I leave that as my final answer.

  24552 71860 70000 (plaintext)
- 20247 88641 30412 (key)
-------------------------
  04315 93229 40698 (encrypted)

Decrypting our string is as simple as reversing the modular arithmetic by adding the key to the encrypted string. This will reproduce our original plaintext string. To convert the string back to the original message we simply refer back to our straddling checkerboard grid to recompose the message – SIMPLE!!

The first thing I needed to do to move this project forward was write a simple form to gather my data:

<html>
<body>
<form action="process.php" method="post">
<p>Your message:<br /><textarea name="text" rows="40" cols="180" /></textarea></p>
<p>Decode: <input type="checkbox" name="decode" value="yes" /></p>
<p>Enter Key: <input type="password" value="" name="key" autocomplete="off" /></p>
<p><input type="submit" value="Encode/Decode" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<input type="reset" value="Reset" /></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>

With my form in place, now I could start developing the code to replicate the straddling checkerboard cipher that was described in the 2600 article. The resulting script was fully functional but WAY more complex than I wanted. As I thought about ways to simplify my code, I recalled that most programming languages have a number of built-in bitwise operators that I might be able to leverage to really simplify what I was trying to accomplish.

The operator that I narrowed in on is called XOR. It works by looking at two bit patterns of equal length and performs a logical exclusive OR operation on each pair of corresponding bits. The result in each position is 1 if only the first bit is 1 OR only the second bit is 1, but will be 0 if both are 0 or both are 1. This is equivalent to being 1 if the two bits are different, and 0 if they are the same.

Calculating an XOR result (2 ^ 7 = 5)

As this example shows, the 4, 2 and 1 columns have bits in the ON position. Since the 2 column bit is ON for both our numbers it becomes OFF, that leaves the 4 and 1 columns. When we add those together the resulting number is five. Since this XOR functionality is built-in to PHP the complexity of building this computational logic was removed thus allowing me to really simplify my code. Following are the results:

<?php

 $key = $_POST['key'];

 // Our plaintext/ciphertext
 if (strtolower($_POST['decode']) == "yes") {
   $text = base64_decode($_POST['text']);
 } else {
   $text = $_POST['text'];
 }

 // Iterate through each character
 for($i=0;$i<strlen($text);)
 {
     for($j=0;$j<strlen($key);$j++,$i++)
     {
         $outText .= $text{$i} ^ $key{$j};
     }
 }

 if (strtolower($_POST['decode']) == "yes") {
   echo "<p>Your message:<br /><textarea name=\"text\" rows=\"40\" cols=\"180\">"  . $outText  . "</textarea></p>";
 } else {
   echo "<p>Your encoded message:<br /><textarea name=\"text\" rows=\"40\" cols=\"180\">"  . base64_encode($outText)  . "</textarea></p>";
 }

 echo "<br /><br /><a href='https://www.example.com/form.html'>Return</a>";

?>

If the key provided matches the criteria outlined previously then the output from this script should be a true one-time pad. The reality, however is that it’s highly impractical to meet the one-time pad key criteria to make our ciphertext unbreakable. If you choose to use the same key for all of your enciphering (more practical) then the resulting ciphertext is, obviously, less secure. If your key is shorter than your plaintext, thus requiring the key to repeat then the resulting ciphertext is now encoded in what is known as a stream cipher.

I wouldn’t necessarily use the results of this script for anything of significant value but it was nonetheless and interesting exercise for gaining a deeper understanding of ciphers and how they can be implemented for obfuscation purposes in ones own solutions.

Until next time – GEEK OUT!

~GT~

   

 Posted by James L at 8:19 pm
 Older Entries
© 2012 Geek-Tips Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha