The Serpent in the Sword continued...

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:06:24 -0700

The Serpent in the Sword project is slowly progressing. I have posted a couple more videos documenting the process. In part 2, the bevels of the sword are forged, the geometry is established on a belt sander and the sword is finally heat treated. In part 3, the sword fittings are made, e.g. the lower and upper guard as well as the pommel and wooden hilt. If things go right, the sword will be finished just in time to my visit to Germany in July. The Viking museum in Haithabu has a special event in which 20 Viking ships will sail to its harbor. There is also the new Viking Puppet Theater which should be fun to watch. It's called "Wikinger Puppentheater Ygdrasil" and has it's premiere in April at the museum in Haithabu.

The Serpent in the Sword

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:47:00 -0800

Inspired by "The Serpent in the Sword" from Lee A Jones, I embarked on the quest of forging a pattern-welded double-edged sword that has a visual serpent at its core. The video shows my progress over about 7 days of work. Pattern-welding in addition to structural benefits is also visually very attractive. The sword in this video is constructed from a total of seven bars. Two edge bars, two twisted bars and three bars for the serpent. The whole process while using modern tools is very similar to the one that anglo-saxon or viking-age blacksmiths might have employed. Each step in created a pattern-welded sword is explained and narrated in the video above.

Pattern-Welded Seax

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:17:44 -0800

In my quest to forge another double-edged viking-age sword, I have been experimenting with a serpent pattern. As part of my experimentation, I forged the the seax shown in the picture. It's over all length is 21.5 in, with a 16.5 in long blade and 5in long handle. It's a 7 bar construction. The cutting edge and back are W1. The two twisted bars are 11-layers of 15n20 and 1095. The serpent itself is an 11-layer straight laminate of 15n20 and 1095 backed by two bars of mild steel. As the picture shows the pattern came out quite nicely and the overall shape of the blade is quite pleasing. The next project is going to take the serpent pattern to a double-edged sword. We will see how that goes.

Creating a Viking Sword

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 19:39:40 -0800

Forging a Composite Viking-age Sword

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:15:11 -0700

The video shows forging a pattern-welded Viking-age sword consisting of a 5-bar construction based on dimensions from a find in Norway. The video shows squaring up the rods and how I bundle the five bars (3 twisted core and 2 edge) into a sword-like object and then forge weld it. Instead of employing a wrap around edge, I am cutting a V into the tip that is forge-welded back together.

Viking-Age Iron Making In Oakland

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:18:22 -0700

Looking forward to USENIX Security!

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:36:40 -0700

USENIX Security is by far my favorite conference. This year is taking place in San Francisco from August 8th to August 11th and the program looks pretty strong again. There is some great work on quickly detecting malicious Javascript in the Browser and the talk on "Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces" promises to make us all rethink the security of our cars. Actually, all of the sessions seem like they will be interesting. So, see you all there.

Pattern-Welded Kurzsax

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 10:56:23 -0700

This knife is a multi-bar construction with W1 for the cutting edge and 1095 and 15n20 for the twisted rods. It is inspired by early Viking-age finds from Norway. The guard and pommel are made from brass and embossed with a triangle design. The handle is made from bok oak used in the defensive ring wall of the Viking-age Haithabu settlement in Northern Germany.

The knife was created as the result of an accident. While working on the rods for a Langsax, I twisted too hard and a piece of the rod sheared off. Fortunately, that piece was long enough to suffice for a Kurzsax. The blade is about 7.5in long and then handle measures 5.5in for a total of 13in. The knife features a scandi grind and is very sharp. There is no secondary bevel on the edge.

Mästermyr inspired Chest

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Fri, 20 May 2011 05:29:31 -0700

Last year, I started making an oak chest with forged straps and lock inspired by the Viking-age tool chest found at Mästermyr. The chest uses the same construction as the original one, e.g. mortise and through tenon, rabbets for the front and back, compound angles due to all sides leaning in and dowels. The straps, hinges and chest handle are not authentic but look quite nice.

From Mästermyr Chest

More in progress pictures can be found in the album.

Forging a Chest Handle

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:25:59 -0700

As my work on the Mästermyr-like chest is slowly coming to completion, I noticed that due to thicker planks, the chest is getting too heavy to carry comfortably without handles. Although, the original chest did not have any handles, I decided to forge handles anyway. None of the books in my library had good illustrations of Viking-age handles but the simple design above is going to fit with the hardware I have forged so far.

This handle was forged from a 7in long piece of 3/4in round steel. I isolated a 1in piece in the middle by fullering with a spring fuller at 3in and 4in from the end. After the middle piece was isolated, I tapered both sides to 1/4in so that each end was about 6in in length. The transitions were square, octagon and then round as usual. Each end was bend at 3in over the horn of the anvil.

The loops were forged from 1/4in thick and 1in wide rectangular steel. I used a butcher to get a tenon that could be forged down to 1/4in round and then drilled a 1/2in hole for the eye where the handle is going to fit through.

To make the handle stop rotating at 90 degrees, i.e. to avoid squeezing the hands, I put each end of the handle in the vise and used a set hammer to bend a stop that is going to engage with the plate, see the picture. The base plate is 1/8in thick and the loops where riveted to it with the handle in place. The whole process took about 5 hours.

Surprisingly, aside from a couple blacksmithing books, I could not find any article on the web that shows how to forge a chest handle.

Lizamoon SQL Injection Campaign Compared

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 15:24:20 -0700

Malware infections such as SQL injection are a well known security problem. Over the past two years we have seen several large-scale infections on the web, e.g. Gumblar.cn and Martuz.cn. Recently, a new SQL injection campaign called Lizamoon has gained a lot of attention. I had expected web sites would become more secure over time and less susceptible to simple security problems, so it is surprising that SQL injection is still a prevalent problem. That let me to wonder: Was Lizamoon as successful as previous infections? In a discussion about this problem, my colleague Panayiotis Mavrommatis suggested that comparing the size of campaigns via search engine result estimates might not be very accurate measurement.

That begs the question of how to assess the impact of infections. While the number of infected URLs is one possible measure, it is skewed by many different factors, e.g. a single vulnerable site contributes a large fraction of the infected URLs and overstates the impact. Instead, counting the number of infected sites might be a better metric. Even so, to judge the relative scale of an infection campaign, it might be helpful to compare it to previous incidents.

Below is a comparison of the Gumblar.cn/, Martuz.cn/ and Lizamoon infections based on Google's Safe Browsing data. The graph shows the number of unique infected sites over a 30 day sliding window.

For this analysis, I counted the sites that had a functioning reference to it, e.g. a script src=. Sites that escaped the script tag rendering it harmless were not counted. For Lizamoon, I aggregated the sites provided by the websense blog into a single measure:

hxxp://lizamoon.com/
hxxp://tadygus.com/
hxxp://alexblane.com/
hxxp://alisa-carter.com/
hxxp://online-stats201.info/
hxxp://stats-master111.info/
hxxp://agasi-story.info/
hxxp://general-st.info/
hxxp://extra-service.info/
hxxp://t6ryt56.info/
hxxp://sol-stats.info/
hxxp://google-stats49.info/
hxxp://google-stats45.info/
hxxp://google-stats50.info/
hxxp://stats-master88.info/
hxxp://eva-marine.info/
hxxp://stats-master99.info/
hxxp://worid-of-books.com/
hxxp://google-server43.info/
hxxp://tzv-stats.info/
hxxp://milapop.com/
hxxp://pop-stats.info/
hxxp://star-stats.info/
hxxp://multi-stats.info/
hxxp://google-stats44.info/
hxxp://books-loader.info/
hxxp://google-stats73.info/
hxxp://google-stats47.info/
hxxp://google-stats50.info/

The graph shows two interesting facts.

The Lizamoon campaign started around September 2010 and actually peaked in October 2010 with ~5600 infected sites. At the moment, it seems to be undergoing a revival.
If we compare the number of infected sites, Gumblar.cn/ is still clearly the winner with ~62,000 sites, followed closely by Martuz.cn/.

For future studies of malware infections, I suggest taking the number of infected sites as a more reliable measure than counting the number of infected URLs.

Update 2011-04-04: The blog post incorrectly referred to Gumblar.cn and Martuz.cn/ as SQL injection attacks. These attacks used stolen FTP credentials.

Honeyd.org running with phpBB3

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:44:30 -0800

Despite being incredibly busy at work, and purusing many extra curricular activities, I finally managed to update www.honeyd.org to phpBB3. Unfortunately, the spammers were slowly taking over the forum and phpBB2 did not provide adquate tools for managing spam. phpBB3 on the other hand supports recaptcha and other nice spam managing features. I also hope to release a new version of honeyd including bug fixes and support for libevent2.

Profile Story On Me :-)

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 19:39:25 -0800

CNet's Ellinor Mills wrote a nice security profile on me with the catching title: Google's Niels Provos battles malware on the Web. Blacksmithing, security, martial arts, etc, it's all there.

HotSec'11 CFP Out: Singular emphasis on new ideas and problems!

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 13:12:53 -0800

The HotSec 2011 CFP is out:

http://www.usenix.org/events/hotsec11/cfp/

Important Dates

Submissions due: May 5, 2011, 11:59 p.m. EST
Notification of acceptance: June 14, 2011
Electronic files of final papers due: July 5, 2011

HotSec is renewing its focus by placing singular emphasis on new ideas and problems. Works reflecting incremental ideas or well understood problems will not be accepted. Cross-discipline papers identifying new security problems or exploring approaches not previously applied to security will be given special consideration. All submissions should propose new directions of research, advocate non-traditional approaches, report on noteworthy experience in an emerging area, or generate lively discussion around an important topic.

Virtual Nudity at Airports

nospam@example.com (Niels Provos) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 07:41:15 -0700

Recently, I had the pleasure of flying from the new terminal at the San Jose Airport. The building is quite nice from the inside and even has some cool futuristic moving statues. With all the good stuff comes also a set of virtual nudity machines at the security screening point. The virtual nudity machines also known as backscatter x-ray screening promise increased privacy since the naked images of passengers are viewed at a remote location and there is no requirement of a physical examination. As the sign states these machines are optional but whoever refuses must subject themselves to a thorough physical pat down. I already had one really bad experience with the virtual nudity machines at another airport - I was told I was not allowed to wear my watch or any necklaces. Well, this time I chose the metal detector and walked through without any further hassles. However, I had the pleasure of watching every single person who was shepherded through the virtual nudity machines being patted down. One woman had her breast touched - perhaps she dared to wear an underwire bra? The next guy got patted down around his legs. His offense was a chap stick hidden in his pocket. What really amused me was the guy after him who was patted down because he had not removed his handkerchief from his pocket. At the end of the day, anyone going through the backscatter x-ray machines got patted down and spent a significantly longer time at the security checkpoint. This seems like an overly expensive experiment that hopefully will be abandoned soon.