February 6, 2019
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The problem with Grab

As a company, Grab has done enormously well for itself, and naturally will be the target of some hate.

But I think there’s a deeper issue with Grab that needs addressing before it becomes an unsolvable problem.

Grab is a win-win

Let’s start with what makes Grab so appealing.

Grab (at least in my mind) is the highest paying hourly wage job in the country. As long as you possess a car, and a valid driving license you can be a Grab driver, earning significantly more than any other hourly wage job.

According to this WOB article (which looks suspiciously like a paid ad), the average Grab driver earns RM5,000 per month, which is crazy money for a unskilled job — and yes driving Grab is unskilled labour.

For unskilled work in Malaysia, earning RM5,000 per month is a god-send, after all even graduate employees don’t earn that much. And like all hourly wage jobs, the more hours you put in, the more money they make — 5,000 is just where it starts

So this seems like a win-win for everyone, drivers get to earn, and at the same time provide a service that is in high demand.

And in truth, Grab is a win-win — at least for now.

Fast-forward

The problem is that when you fast-forward 10 years, or just 2 elections from now.

Most Grab drivers I’ve met aren’t doing this part-time. They’re driving as a full-time job, and they’re putting in serious hours (10-12 a day) to make serious money. That means they’ve no time or to up-skill themselves, because every hour learning a new skill is an hour they could have been driving.

The cost of learning to them is a double-whammy, first they spend on acquiring the new skill (like everybody else), but also the lose income from their not driving. This for most, will be too high a price to pay.

You might argue that driving isn’t un-skilled. But all it takes to be a Grab driver is a driving license and a car, skills don’t factor into this. Grab doesn’t care if you’re a PhD, diploma holder or SPM drop-out, it’ll pay the same.

Grab views all of it’s drivers as a supplier of the one commodity it needs — cars to move passengers. The only time Grab pays more to drivers is when they turn on the auto-accept feature, because that makes their algorithm more efficient. The more subservient you are to the algorithm, the better it will reward you — that is a pretty nasty feeling.

So as more folks join the Grab band-wagon, we’re sucking out skilled labour from the job-market. Leaving the entire country, as a whole, worse off in terms of competitiveness. But we’re just getting started.

February 4, 2019
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Android TV boxes

Android TV boxes, are computers that stream content from the internet onto your TV. The difference between them and your smart-phone is that it has a HDMI connector to your TV, and it usually comes pre-loaded with software to illegally stream content.

While the boxes themselves, are general purpose computers running Android (the most popular OS today), the real focus of any regulation should be on the software on the device and the internet-based streaming services that support them.

Which seems to be the case…

Today, TheStar reports that the MCMC will begin blocking these unauthorized streaming services, rendering the boxes that connect to them useless.

But, if the MCMC uses it’s usual method of DNS filtering to implement the block, it’ll be trivial for most folks to circumvent the issue, the boxes run Android after all. The government will very quickly find itself in a cat and mouse situation in trying to block them.

December 24, 2018
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2018 in Review

I started the year building out govScan.info, a site that audits .gov.my websites for TLS implementation. Overall I curated a list of ~5000 Malaysian government domains through various OSINT and enumeration techniques and now use that list to scan them…

December 20, 2018
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Introducing potassium-40

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been toying with lambda functions and thinking about using them for more than just APIs. I think people miss the most interesting aspect of serverless functions — namely that they’re massively parallel capability, which can do a lot more than just run APIs or respond to events.

There’s 2-ways AWS let’s you run lambdas, either via triggering them from some event (e.g. a new file in the S3 bucket) or invoking them directly from code. Invoking is a game-changer, because you can write code, that basically offloads processing to a lambda function directly from the code. Lambda is a giant machine, with huge potential.

What could you do with a 1000-core, 3TB machine, connected to a unlimited amount of bandwidth and large number of ip addresses?

Here’s my answer. It’s called potassium-40, I’ll explain the name later

So what is potassium-40

Potassium-40 is an application-level scanner that’s built for speed. It uses parallel lambda functions to do http scans on a specific domain.

Currently it does just one thing, which is to grab the robots.txt from all domains in the cisco umbrella 1 million, and store the data in the text file for download. (I only grab legitimate robots.txt file, and won’t store 404 html pages etc)

This isn’t a port-scanner like nmap or masscan, it’s not just scanning the status of a port, it’s actually creating a TCP connection to the domain, and performing all the required handshakes in order to get the robots.txtfile.

Scanning for the existence of ports requires just one SYN packet to be sent from your machine, even a typical banner grab would take 3-5 round trips, but a http connection is far more expensive in terms of resources, and requires state to be stored, it’s even more expensive when TLS and redirects are involved!

Which is where lambda’s come in. They’re effectively parallel computers that can execute code for you — plus AWS give you a large amount of free resources per month! So not only run 1000 parallel processes, but do so for free!

A scan of 1,000,000 websites will typically take less than 5 minutes.

But how do we scan 1 million urls in under 5 minutes? Well here’s how.

October 15, 2018
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GitHub webhooks with Serverless

GitHub Webhooks
with Serverless

Just because you have webhook, doesn’t mean you need a webserver.

With serverless AWS Lambdas you’ve got a free (as in beer) and always on ability to receive webhooks callbacks without the need for pesky servers. In this post, I’ll setup a serverless solution to accept incoming POST from a GitHub webhook.

October 15, 2018
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govScan.info now has DNS records

DNS Queries on GovScan.Info

This post is a very quick brain-dump  of stuff I did over the weekend, in the hopes that I don’t forget it :). Will post more in-depth material if time permits over the weekend.

govScan.info, a site I created as a side hobby project to track TLS implementation across .gov.my websites — now tracks DNS records as well. For now, I’m only tracking MX, NS, SOA and TXT records (mostly to check for dmarc) but I may put more record types to query.

DNS Records are queried daily at 9.05pm Malaysia Time (might be a minute or two later, depending on the domain name) and will be stored indefinitely. Historical records can be queried via the API, and documentation has been updated.

October 7, 2018
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Supply Chain Woes

The security community has been abuzz with an absolutely shocker of story from Bloomberg. The piece reports that the Chinese Government had subverted the hardware supply chain of companies like Apple and Amazon, and installed a ‘tiny chip’ on motherboards manufactured by a company called Supermicro. What the chip did — or how it did ‘it’ was left mostly to the readers imagination.

Supermicro’s stock price is down a whooping 50%, which goes to show just how credible Bloomberg is as a news organization. But besides the Bloomberg story and the sources (all of which are un-named), no one else has come forward with any evidence to corroborate the piece. Instead, both Apple and Amazon have vehemently denied nearly every aspect of the story — leaving us all bewildered.

But Bloomberg are sticking to their guns, and they do have credibility — so let’s wait and see. For now, let’s put this in the bucket called definitely could happen, but probably didn’t happen.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to secure a modern hardware supply chain, but the reason for this post is to share my experience in some supply chain conundrums that occurred to a recent project of mine.

I operate (for fun) a website called GovScan.info,  a python based application that scans various gov.my websites for TLS implementation (or lack thereof). Every aspect of the architecture is written in Python 3.6, including a scanning script, and multiple lambda functions that are exposed via an API, with the entirety of the code available on github.

And thank God for GitHub, because in early August I got a notification from GitHub alerting me to a vulnerability in my code. But it wasn’t a vulnerability in anything I wrote — instead it was in a 3rd-party package my code depended on. 

October 3, 2018
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Hosting a static website on S3 and Cloudflare

Hosting an S3 site via Cloudflare

From my previous post, you can see that I hosted a slide show on a subdomain on hitbgsec.keithrozario.com. The site is just a keynote presentation exported to html format, which I then hosted on an S3 bucket.

The challenge I struggled with, was how to point the domain which I hosted on Cloudflare to the domain hosting the static content.

The recommended way is to just create a simple CNAME entry and point it to the S3 bucket, but that didn’t work because the ‘crypto’ settings on Cloudflare apply to the entire domain — and not individual subdomains.

And since my website at www.keithrozario.com had a crypto setting of ‘Full’, the regular CNAME entry kept failing. I could have downgraded to ‘Flexible’ but that would mean my blog would be downgraded as well — which wasn’t ideal.

Why downgrade my main blog to accommodate a relatively unimportant sub-domain.

Instead found that the solution is to overlay a CloudFront Distribution in front of S3 Bucket — and then point a CNAME entry to the Distribution.

The solution looks something like this: