There comes a time in every man’s life, when one wonders if there really is anything worthwhile in this world, apart from Wodehouse, Tandoori Chicken, Aloo Paranthas and Mangoshakes. Sure the less prudent would say what about women… and I wud say what about them? The most arcane creatures god ever made… one is never sure how they would behave… they always leave u in a lurch… more trouble than are worth…

But surely Mr. Garg you have found more to life than reading and literature… how about music? Well music amplifies but our joys and sorrows our passions and pleasures… but whr do those originate … in food and literature …

Another sketch…
Attempt at a caricature of my little sister.. she wont be happy

House is back, so is Friday Night Lights and so is Heroes… I have been living on snickers bars… weight and body bulk have assumed embarrassingly large proportions… the Sunscreen video statement “You are not as fat as you think you are” no longer gives me comfort… so off to the tread mill we went… a good start hopefully I shall stay firm to my vision and continue… On a happier note I received the highest grades in an assignment, not only that but I got full marks… cant remember the last time THAT happened… I have of course found a new distraction Sketching… Have decided chucked all serious reading for a while… as I am reading Gandhi for a course… which is serious enough thank you… so I have resorted to PG Wodehouse… I wanted to save those books for some troubled time some dark period… it seems I have arrived there … received a well extremely flattering testimonial off late… that was nice…

And yes I am now the proud owner of an iPhone… God bless Apple!!!

And yes this is my work —>>>

The biggest problem in making net safe is the people. It is very hard to make sure that there are no robberies if people leave their houses unlocked and a sign on the porch saying it is so, when they go out. Because this is what people are doing. The sad thing is that most of the time they are unaware of this. These are a few thumb rules one should live by… readers add more…

1) Don’t use public computers for financial transactions or logging into accounts with sensitive information.
2) Never open an attachments with a funny extension… (you think this is obvious… Rolls Royce are going through a major revamp because one of their employees didn’t follow this simple rule).
3) Never use your computer in admin mode when you are online. If you need to install something, go offline log into admin install, log off, log into a user account and go online. Malware can do very little if the account is it activated on has next to zero privileges.
4) Selling or getting rid of a old hard disk… formatted it… safe now… NO!… even after formatting your information can be taken off it… degauss it… or take the safer route destroy it… or you might find it on ebay….
5) Use multiple passwords, a single password for all accounts is cutting it a little toooo close…
6) I know you hate MS… but if your program crashes and it asks you whether you want to send the info to MS… do it… and always update the OS… best option put it on automatic update…
7) Use Antivirus… prevention is better then cure…
Everyone loves to download for free…. but nothing is free ever… some of the most frequent malware sources are free download site… especially the ones with pornographic content…
9) If your computer is slowing down, it is probably infected with malware…
10) People using wireless networks… make sure it is a secure link…
11) People using MS… your systems are mostly the ones targeted, you need to be extra careful…
12) Never ask Why me? You might think no one is interested in you… but you might never know…
13) No SSN is not a good password… neither are dictionary words… nor is your birthday…

I got my first paycheck. Its a feeling like none else. Now how to blow the dough. I am torn between different iPods and the iPhone, drumset, piano, guitar and well the standard saving it for better things and rainy days. Laziness at an all time high. Today I heard a song I had forgotten I even wrote, that was fun. Tomorrow is Gandhi Jayanti…. dont have much else to say on the subject. College sickness at an all time high. Listening to Poets of Fall. Nice band. Been active on Tempostand.com. That place is like filled with talent. Brilliant idea. DAIICTians rule all.

http://www.tempostand.com/folk-rock/

Survival in the face of early morning meetings and lectures. No lunch. Dizzy at the end of the day. Go home to half cooked food, swimming in oil, no salt, no spices. Coke Coke, burgers (pork, hashbrown, beef, chicken) and pringles. Audioslave. Too many marathi speaking people. Lack of ability to learn tongues. Antibiotics… antiallergics… catching up on reading movies… homework, procastnation… no more time… Morning… more meetings… unhappy profs… antipleasure… antilife…pro work … inquiring undergrads… bumbling me… insecure… cornered… silence… guitar… solace… music music and fits of euphoria, sadness, anger… real emotions generated artificially… Synapse 2007… nostalgia.. long distance calls… reliving old memories… rereliving… graduating the worst thing that ever happened to me… galla galla dear old galla… smoking not fun anymore… smoke smoke no more hope…

It is sad how many of these are actual T-Shirts.

For those who have been in their labs, struggling with embedded devices, plundering the JTAG hole to their advantage. I have news for you, manufacturers are wising up to thy game. American giant Motorola has taken the first step by putting time money and initiative into something they are calling Secure JTAG. This functionality not only allows for limited access, it allows for authenticated priority based access. It is quite amazing when you think about it.

The whole security feature of course had to be behind the JTAG so as to block the latter. It cannot be software implemented, or can be easily overridden. So the whole system is hardware based and has been implemented inside the processor it seems. To even if I manage to remove the chip from the circuit I can for the life of me not disable the mechanism even physically.

It is primarily a three party challenge response based protocol. It is based on elliptic curve cryptography. Interested people might want to go check out the paper… the research is cool… cant say the same for the writing… :sigh:….

www.motorola.com/techpubs

The strip below is once again brought to you by asofterworld.com… brilliant… make some time in your sorry life and discover how sorry it really is… go explore that site…

In India there is a place called Gandhi Ashram. It is like a memorial to Gandhi and his life. I went to that place once with my friends. While all my friends were very impressed by the place and the displays, I found the whole setup to be rather dull and to a certain extent redundant and dead. I thought that the place stressed too much emphasis on the existence of Gandhi rather than the idea of him. In such a situation one is confronted with questions like “What do you mean by the idea of Gandhi?” “Is it even possibly to depict physically an idea, a notion which might as well differ from person to person?” These are the kind of questions that are, as Berlin [1] states, neither empirical nor formal.
The first question the skeptic asks is whether such questions are of any importance. What purpose do they serve? To what ends to they cater? How do they affect our existence our future and present?
While Berlin [1] goes to great lengths about how a certain section of inquiries cannot be placed in the hackneyed terminology of empirical and formal sciences, the paper fails to answer any of the above questions. What the paper seems to be concentrating on is to justify the existence of philosophy (maybe as a science) despite it qualifying as neither empirical nor formal. To that end the writer goes on to show how the modern branches of sciences are riddled with philosophical inquiries. The paper discusses the origins of ‘astronomy’ and how that used to be in the domain of philosophy and how with the advent of the space age it tried to unfetter itself of ‘the shackles of philosophy’ and go over to the realm of sciences, and how it still has leftover (as well as new) abstract questions which can not be solved by the scientific approach.
Then the writer uses a phrase no philosophers questions are physical, some physicists questions are still philosophical. Now while this statement is very cute, it is extremely irritating to a person of scientific disposition because it seems that philosophy and philosophers simply prey on the absence of observed and empirical data and the lack of clarity of the human mind, rather being serious and try to solve issues. Or to put it simply it seems that the purpose of philosophy is to muddle rather than elucidate.
I rather like the idea of philosophy because while we look at the same things what we see is totally different. A cliché example of this would be the half tumbler of water: one sees it as half filled and another as half empty. How do we resolve the conflict of ideas? And more importantly how do we resolve the conflict of facts? So many times trouble spews not from notions but facts. While men like Machiavelli will say the deceit and manipulation is the essence of stable and successful governance for the greater good, can science help us refute the treatise or guiltlessly embrace the same? No these shoes can only be filled by philosophy, which is like fluid and thus can mould itself according to vessel. Once poured however getting it to harden and explain the shape of the problem is not always that easy, or sometimes even feasible. However the way is not to give up on philosophy, by trying to fit the question to a science by scraping the surface and trying to fit the question to the answer instead of finding a fitting answer.
The trouble with philosophy is that by its very nature it is a gradient of grey. Its gossamer abstractions are hard to grasp. It is impossible to not be overwhelmed, sometimes to a degree of being suicidal like Umberto Eco and Nietzsche. Here I would quote an example from a Douglas Adams’ book where a supercomputer is set to the task of finding the ultimate answer. When the answer is discovered it turns out to be 42. The bamboozled reader is told that the people looking for the answer didn’t know question. Apart from being extremely droll, this situation holds a lot of truth. A lot of times in philosophical pursuits one loses sight of the question to an extent that one ends up with a bigger mess than what one began with. But this situation is not singular to philosophy. You can see it various branches of sciences. Only where philosophy is concerned it might be slightly harder to see the answers right away. The difficulty of the ordeal does not render it useless just makes it more daunting. And this is what the philosopher is left to deal with, all the while looking to justify this pursuit to the society (as in non philosophers). To that end Berlin [1] does do justice by expounding in very clear terms that philosophy is cumbersome to handle, as it does not provide with systematic or well-defined approaches to a problem. Picking on the terminology of Berlin himself, when dealing with philosophy one has to act like the fox rather than the hedgehog. This view is in slight contradiction with Science where everyone wants to do an Einstein and be a hedgehog. Picking on the writings of Kant, Berlin remarks that the difference in perception of any instance for between individuals, between cultures, between people of different religions means that one cannot have a single satisfactory universal answer, which is in contradiction to well the standard scientific notion (there are of course exception like the wave-particle duality, but then Berlin classifies that too as a philosophical question). This means that to resolve questions of liberty, justice, ethics etc. one needs to look to philosophy for answers instead of science. Thus I do agree with the writer that Philosophy is indeed important. However I do not agree with his approach of trying to justify or prove the preceding statement. I believe he glosses over a lot of questions while not even touching some of the more important ones. I believe the article is repetitive and redundant (just like this statement). But since the article is by Isaiah Berlin one wonders if one is in ones right mind to criticize it. (However the writer is supposed to have remarked that his reputation was based on the systematic overestimation of his abilities.)

References
[1] Berlin, I. (2000) “The Power of Ideas”, Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey.

As the titles says this is about JTAGS. What are JTAGS? Well laymen language, since all processor designs are prone to screwups, they keep a port for testing and debugging which is called JTAG. These ports I believe are also there on… well memory chips and likes, but unlike in mobile processors they are not accessible, relatively speaking of course.

So you say… so what, right? I have a testing and debugging port, big deal… what do I do with it? Well Mr. Breeuwsma from the Netherlands Forensics Institute published a paper (titled: Forensic Imaging of Embedded Systems using JTAG). This paper explains how you can use this little functionality to get all the data off the memory chips of your mobile.

Wait you said Memory chips’ JTAGs can’t be accessed. True but the JTAG on the processor can be, and since the memory is connected to the processor we can figure out a way to get the data from the memory off the JTAG port of the processor.

To begin a JTAG has three modes of operation: Normal, Extest, Debug. I have no clue what Normal does. Extest is obviously the testing mode. And Debug is well… the debug mode. We are interested in the extest and debug mode and I will discuss each of these in future posts.

Meanwhile why JTAGS?
1. Forensically secure. Since memory is accessed directly data doesnt change.
2. Bypasses any user level passwords.
3. Works for crashed systems.
4. Desoldering a chip works only for non-volatile chips, is risky and in my view is simply barbaric. JTAG analysis has none of these issues.
5. Works for SDRAM as well. (SDRAM can not be removed from the board cause they lose data as soon as they lose power.)

Blah Blah Blah… I think I made my point. This is not full proof, not by a long shot, but looks extremely promising…

“I don’t mind death,” he said, “I’m not afraid of it. I’m afraid of dying for it could be painful. But I find death a nuisance; I object to it. I’d rather it didn’t happen. … I’m terribly curious. I’d like to live forever.”

- Isaiah Berlin

I would just like to say — Ditto!!!

Mobile Forensics is one of the upcoming fields in the area of Information Security. While initially it was bundled with Computer Forensics, it posed problems which were unique in many aspects. Thus we had something called Small Scale Digital Device Forensics. I could have used that term in the title, but I kind of like pithy titles. Anyways I am going to blabber on the what sort of problems are being faced by officers in the field and researchers in the labs when analysing these devices.

The first rule of forensics is that evidence obtained on the site should be preserved in exactly the same condition as it was found. So suppose an officer (say Mr. Goon) finds a mobile on the scene of a crime. What does he do with it (apart from trying to keep the fingerprints intact… think of technology situations)? Does he switch it off or does he leave it on? If he leaves it on there might be a string of incoming messages which might overwrite existing data on the mobile. If I switch it off… well for all I know when I turn that thing back on.. it might ask for a password. These are a couple of examples, however the thing is you can not switch it off because you are changing the state of the device, which goes against the law of Forensics. And you can not leave it on cause not only can new data overwrite data but also the device being on network is open to intrusion of different types.

One of the solutions is that you put the mobile in specially built bags which block signals, thus taking the device off the network. The issues with this approach are multifold. One these bags are very expensive. So if you are a small time Inspector in India, you can not afford to have one of these bags. Two these bags do not work for the better part (irrespective of how costly the bag is). Technology like jamming is unfortunately banned in many countries (including the United States). Even if you somehow block the signal (assuming the bag works). The problem is that the device will keep on trying to find a network which is a very energy intensive task. So basically your battery runs out and you have a dead device on you. And you thought this would be simple… welcome to wonderland…

P.S. look at the pic below and if u like it search for ” A SOFTER WORLD”…