• Adblock Plus: you know what this is for...  Remember to disable when performing penetration testing.
• CacheViewer: Allows for viewing and sorting of cache files.  Seldom used, but a great tool nonetheless when the need comes for it.
• Domain Details: Displays plenty of information about the server (type, headers, IP, location) that you're accessing.  Good for basic information awareness during normal surfing.
• Download Statusbar: View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
• DownThemAll: For fast grabbing of files from a directory.
• Firebug: Powerful tool for web developers that allows you to freely manipulate/view the loaded objects for a page.  I haven't really figured out how to use this for penetration testing yet though.
• Greasemonkey: Could come in very handy if you want to do some mods to a site's page automatically, remember to enable/disable the scripts that aren't needed when on a penetration testing job.
• IE Tab: Don't really use this, unless I get a site that's coded to work only with "browsers like IE".
• iMacros for Firefox: Another powerful macro editing/playback tool, I don't use this though
• JavaScript Debugger: JS debugger and profiler, more useful for web developers I think.
• Live HTTP headers: Great for showing basic information about the HTTP headers being exchanged.
• NoScript: A MUST-HAVE for Forefox.  Whitelists the scripts and objects that are allowed to load for a domain, amongst other protection features against other nasties out there.  Remember to disable for penetration testing engagements.
• People Search and Public Record Toolbar: Great tool for information gathering, pity I never had the chance to really use it
• ScrapBook: Aids in archiving and organizing pages.  I use it to profile a site's workflow.
• SwitchProxy / FoxyProxy: A must-have for changing between the many proxy tools that I use.
• Tamper Data: I use this to grab extra timeline information about the loading of pages.  Also allows you to do request/response editing.
• User Agent Switcher: Self explanatory.  Useful for certain situations only.
• View Dependencies: A must-have for organizing image/JavaScript/CSS resources for a page in a tidy manner.
• View formatted source: Formats HTML source neatly for viewing.
• View Source Chart: Formats final document DOM (after all the loading/JavaScript events have finished firing) for easy viewing.  Also for when View formatted source isn't available for the version of Firefox that you're using.
• Web Developer: Great for manipulating the forms/cookies/JavaScript/whatnot on a page.  A definite must-have for penetration testing.

A short review on the different parts of this system so far...

1. Automatic starting

The OpenVPN client installed can be made to autostart and run as a background service, (re-)connecting to the VPN automatically whenever there's network connectivity to the OpenVPN server.  Coupled with automatic configuration of the client's DNS resolver list this allows for automatic protection/privacy of the DNS queries sent out.  The automatic configuration of the DNS resolver can be disabled too if need be.

2. Ease of use

Connecting to the proxy afterward is a "simple" proxy configuration change in the browser of choice.  This can be conveniently done (and undone) with extensions like Proxy Switchy! for Google Chrome, or FoxyProxy for Firefox.

3. Initial setup efforts needed

All this is working nice and dandy for me now, with little inconvenience involved in activating SecureMe. Now one of the problems faced in making this user-friendly/"idiot-proof" would be the high setup efforts needed (really plenty of hoops to jump through, especially for the no-so-technically-inclined user).  One way would be to come up with some sort of "portable" package that has been preconfigured as much as possible, or an installer that helps you to do most of the work.

4. DNS requests leakage

Another issue is the small possibility of DNS request leaks.  For example, the behaviour of the OpenVPN client in linux is to add the DNS resolver at the top of the resolver list (/etc/resolv.conf), but if the DNS query is deemed to take "too long", the request goes out to the next DNS resolver in the list, which usually is the DNS resolver for the public wifi hotspot.  Though this won't cause things to break, it does allow some queries to go out in the open network.  One of the ways I know of to solve this would be to configure a SOCKS proxy, so that it would be possible for browsers like Firefox to send all DNS queries to the SOCKS proxy.

Conclusion:

This seems to be working well so far, with Linode's rare downtime the past months.  More work could be done to make this simpler for others to setup, but I guess I will only do this sparingly in my free time.  No one seems to be geeky/interested enough to want to have this available to them for free so far, heh. ]]> http://blog.rayfoo.info/2010/02/secureme-so-far/feed 0