Tuesday, June 10, 2014

C++ code to dump memory in hex and ASCII

Every now and then I have the need to dump a block of memory as hex and ASCII in some C++ code I am working on. Each time I google for some code I can snaffle to do the trick. Each time I find something of very mediocre quality which will just about do for the occasion. Well, I finally got sick and tired of this and now I am publishing my own solution. I hope that people find it useful.

Many thanks to ECI training for this YouTube video on how to do file attachments in blogger.

Sunday, June 01, 2014

TrueCrypt has gone! OMG!!!

My hard drive failed so this weekend I started to migrate my stuff over to a new machine which didn't have much stuff set up on it. One of the missing components was truecrypt so I thought I would just download and build from source. What a shock awaited me - truecrypt has gone! See the wikipedia page that describes how it went on 29th May 2014. There was also an article in the Guardian. I am writing this on Sunday 1st June 2014. This was not how I wanted to spend my Sunday!

Conspiracy theories to one side, the practical question remains, what does one do if one wishes to continue using truecrypt as it was? The answer seems to be to build from the source of the 7.1a. Download it from the final release repository. However, there is more to it than that. It doesn't build cleanly. I found someone else who was trying to do what I wanted to do, Reinhard Seiler. He blogged about his build experience. However, this was on a raspberry Pi and I had some different problems. Here's what I found:

  • The build requires nasm, yasm won't do. No problem, I installed it via synaptic package manager.
  • SecurityToken.cpp failed to compile due to missing PKCS11 header files. I followed Reinhard Seiler's instructions, placing the headers from ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v211 into a sub-directory of my truecrypt source. This is so I could copy the entire directory if this ever happens to me again (i.e complete install on new machine needed).
  • I got compilation errors due to missing macros such as CKR_NEW_PIN_MODE. Luckily, I found a blogger who had hit the same problem and posted a solution. Basically you ifdef out the offending lines. It is safe to do this since it is only error message handling.
  • Once it got past the PKCS11 errors I found that it needs fuse. I installed libfuse-dev from synaptic package manager.
  • The final compilation errors came from the GUI bits where it depends on wxWidgets. Synaptic to the rescue!
  • Finally it built. But then I got an error at runtime along the lines of "Failed to communicate with kernel device mapped drive". I had done a rather large synaptic upgrade without bothering to reboot. Apparantly this kernel mode was affecting truecrypt so I was forced to reboot. Then it worked! Hurrah!


Once I had a working version of truecrypt I copied the entire build directory to my external USB backups directory, ready for the next time I need to install truecrypt on a new machine.

Now I will just put on my tinfoil hat briefly. I reckon that it is a conspiracy that truecrypt has gone. The developers say that the tool is not necessary now that Microsoft have BitLocker but this just doesn't wash. For a start I am on linux! And second, BitLocker is closed, secret, proprietary, so there is bound to be an NSA backdoor. Now I will remove my tinfoil hat and go and get a nice cup of coffee!