Pamela
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[edit] WTF?
Project Pamela is the pretty silly name of an idea that Tazo came up with: The basic idea is to be able to see if someone is in hsb and if so who is actually there.
Gunstick from syn2cat came up with a decent naming explanation; from now on and forever more, Pamela means Pretty Amazing Member Enabled Localization Application
Since we are hackers this needs to be automated and here is the idea:
- Have a cron job doing an arp-scan on the localnet and look for all mac adresses in the local net
- for each mac found look up if it belongs to a registered user (this is opt in and we will only publish it if you agree) and then post that information to our wiki server
- show the information who is there in some fancy-shwancy javascript thingy that looks cool
[edit] What do we need?
- first quick and dirty script is available, but this needs to be cleaned up
- make the scanning robust and the transfer to the wiki secure
- optional, but cool idea by helixblue: hook the scanning into TheSilentGuy and let it say "Welcome to hsb, $USER", when somebody joins the network
- create pages (m/b mediawiki extension?) to post information to and to show them (tazo has some dirty php stuff right now)
- sandb want to do some javascript radar thing, sounds cool
- make registering easy (having email addr. pamela@hackerspace.be would be cool)
- have somebody design a logo for this w/o pr0n
[edit] How do we make this secure
The current idea is that the pamela backend script will calculate the sha1 of the mac addresses it finds and sends it to the server. The server also only knows these sha1 not the actual mac addresses. With that setup every user can supply it's information safely as we can sha1 the mac on the browswer side, send it to the webserver (registering) and then we can do the matching logic on the server side. easy peasy
Regarding sha1 for hashing the MAC address, take note that a MAC address only contains 12 * 4 = 48 bits of information. 'Reducing' this to a 128bit hash is not going to do much preventing whoever to invert the process and grab the MAC that goes with the hash. Big salts, or a smaller bitsize hashing algo are recommended. Also, to discourage people reversing the hash into a MAC address, repeat the hashing a few thousand times. This will make it slower to hash, but the reversing is delayed by the same factor (and the forward hashing should still take under a second even for 10k cycles).
[edit] Is there any code to download?
- We have set up a git repo on github: http://github.com/sandb/pamela/
[edit] Brainstorming area
If you have more ideas, dump them here.
- maybe we can also output rss and twitter
[edit] Mac name list
If you want your name to show up instead of your mac, add a line below, and they will be included (someday).
e.g.
23:0f:a4:fb:12:02 = name
