InProtect LiveUSB 0.80.3 Beta!

Though the InProtect project has not made a large number of public postings lately (beta releases and the like...) we have been quite busy. We will soon be releasing a tarball of the latest 0.80.3RC1. That is not, however, the purpose of this article but rather I am releasing a liveUSB image that is an entirely self-contained and functioning installation of InProtect on a FreeBSD 6.3-Current system.

I came up with the idea to create the InProtect LiveUSB when someone requested that I build one for another project that I am an active member of (HeX). Unfortunately it has taken me several months to get the time put together to actually build this tool. Having said that, I am quite pleased with the outcome and functionality of the tool. Placing this tool onto a USB thumb drive gives the user extreme versatility from the perspective of security. Obviously the nature of a USB thumb drive is not terribly secure; we can put them in our pocket and have them fall out in a parking lot where anyone could conceivably pick it up and snag the data off of it and multiple other scenarios. I am more talking about the security of the location or client that may have a sensitive environment with sensitive data and the like. In this scenario the USB device could be taken in and left with the organization, post scan, that has such sensitive data. Again though, the primary purpose of this build is to allow for a solid demo of the InProtect system.

As I said earlier, the system was built using FreeBSD 6.3-Current, ontop of this I built fluxbox (and several applications such as firefox), mysql51, apache22, php5 and several perl modules that are InProtect dependencies. I manually configured all of the components to work with InProtect, the installer currently does not work on freebsd though I am in the process of building a port. In-short, and as stated earlier, this is a fully functional InProtect scanner with a few things that need to be completed by the end-user; Nessus 3.0.x install and jpgraph for php5 install.

The Nessus and jpgraph items are not included in this image due to their licensing restrictions (not GPL). It is for this reason they must be manually installed.

First you will need to download the InProtect LiveUSB 0.80.3 image here:

http://www.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz
MD5 (inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz) = 605a5b20d754ea7e6305922695f301ba
SHA256 (inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz) = 1d562d17db0ef4e3afefcca18fd40932b7faecdddd673910c3ad11a4aab4434b

After obtaining the image and gunzipping it you will want to use dd to write it to a 2G or larger USB thumb drive. NOTE that you want to write it to the device itself and NOT to a specific partition on the device. Also, if you didn't figure it out... this will overwrite anything that you may currently have on your thumb drive.

dd if=/path/to/foo/inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M

Your output file path may be different than /dev/da0 (this is mine on a freebsd boxen). The key is that you are writing directly to the device address and NOT to a partition, that will NOT work. Assuming that you have a thumb drive and computer capable of USB2.0 this process should take around 10 minutes to write all of the data.

At this point you should be able to boot from your new shiny LiveUSB thumbdrive. The initial login details are simple (these ARE case sensitive so pay attention!):

Username: InProtect
Password: inprotect

Once logged in type startx to get into fluxbox. From here, if you are not familiar suggest playing around just a little bit. A few tips, this isn't windoze, you access the main menuwith fluxbox, I by right clicking anywhere on the desktop. The image to the right shows the menu of the InProtect LiveUSB. The highlighted option will take you to the Nessus and jpgraph installation instructions.

Even before you install Nessus or jpgraph you will be able to login to the local instance of InProtect by selecting the InProtect menu option as displayed below. Once you have selected the InProtect menu item, you will be able to use admin / admin for the login and password to access the local instance of InProtect.

Note that until you install Nessus you will not be able to run any scans.

In this image I have already created a default scan zone and default scanner so that once Nessus is installed and the Nessus user created, as noted in the instructions contained on the image, the system is fully functional and scans can be immediately created and executed.

As always please feel free to contact me or leave any comments, criticisms, suggestions or otherwise that you might have.

Cheers,
JJC