Originally written for the Syracuse University College of Engineering blog. A recent discovery in the security community has researchers concerned about Dell devices. Some of these devices have been found to contain something known as a self signed root certificate. Installed by the manufacturer for advertising purposes, these certificates pose …

Originally written for the Syracuse University College of Engineering blog. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to compete in the first-ever Collegiate Pentesting Competition along with five other members from the iSchool's Information Security Club. Hosted by RIT, this competition places competing university teams in the role of security consulting …

Originally written for the Syracuse University College of Engineering blog. Google recently announced plans to merge features from Chrome OS into Android to make the operating system suitable for use with laptops. This means that in the future, we can anticipate Android working across phones, tablets, and laptops. This is …

Android Pay has just come out on the Google Play Store and it's an interesting concept in many ways. I can't help but be curious about its internal workings and after some discussion with a co-worker, I've decided to quickly write up our initial thoughts on the application. Scope These …

This weekend was the weekend over which DARPA hosted its large robotics challenge where semi-autonomous robots had to perform a series of tasks simulating a disaster relief scenario. Specifically, robots had to be able to open doors, shut off water valves, drill holes in walls, climb stairs and more. It …

I figured out how to get Google Play Service and all the basic Google apps onto a custom compiled AOSP image. It's kind of tricky, so I'll outline what I learned here. I specifically got it working on a Nexus 5 device using a modified version of Android 5.0 …

As I promised in my previous blog post, I will try to explain the difference between digital and analog sanitization using an analogy better suited for the task. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, I recommend that you go and read that post. If you were hoping …

Every now and again you hear on the news about some police investigation having a breakthrough by recovering deleted data off of an electronic device belonging to the possible suspect. You may also hear about professional criminals who recover sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, by sifting through the …

Over the weekend, the lab I work in experienced a power outage. After power was restored, one of our servers failed to boot. It ultimately became my responsibility to figure out if the server could be repaired and failure wasn't an option because the server was configured (with no backups …

Here's a fun and quick but practical hack using a small Particle board to turn on and off a computer from anywhere over the internet. This project takes under an hour and is a good little assignment for anyone looking into learning some basic hardware hacking with useful applications. The …