01. Intro#

When I travel, I have a few technology essentials that I like to bring along to include 1) travel router 2) streaming device 3) laptop. Im more likely to forget my toothbrush than I am these things and theyre going to be the focal point of this post. I like to bring a travel router for a few different reasons. The primary reason is that I dont trust any shared network so I would like to ensure there is some kind of VPN, either back to my house or to a VPN provider of my choosing. Next is that the devices I bring along with me have the travel router login pre-programmed, so once the router is plugged in they’ll auto-connect. Lastly I can continue to use my DNS ad blocking and it just helps me get around any weird network restrictions imposed wherever I am, whether thats having to pay per-device in the captive portal, or blocking websites that I like to go to. I will admit that the way I wanted it set up is very particilar, but for documentation purposed this is what I have going for my situation.

Overview#

For school and personal curiosity I wanted to mess around with hosting my own local AI Chat server for testing and evaluation. I wanted this to be open source, private, and privacy concious. This setup enables a LAN-locked AU chat web UI backed by Ollama models with the ability to enable web search, code execution, and HTTPS through a reverse proxy. Its important to note, that this is simply meant to be something contained and not sitting on the public internet.

Intro#

While working on my git repo for my research project found here: https://github.com/adminprivileges/ebpH I was making changes to a local branch and pushing it up to the remote github repo without really worrying about where it was going because I assumed it was going to a remote branch. I was wrong and the changes were going directly to main. This isnt really a huge issue since the repo is only for me, but I’m typing this out so hopefully I dont make this mistake somewhere it actually matters and so I can have the steps to fix it id it does. I’ll include the actual output to give you a practical example as well and you can check out the repo for the exact changes.

Intro#

Today while messing around with one of the HackTheBox retired machines “Previous”, the method of gaining initial access is due to the “Middleware” Authentication Bypass in Next.js. This vulnerability can be exploited to bypass authorization and access sensitive pages. Details of the affected versions can be found here CVE-2025-29927.

Background#

The CVE is a vulnerability in the handling of “middleware”. In its simplest terms (the only ones I understand) middleware is a function used to process a user request in some form or fashion. This could be as simple as parsing raw data into a JSON template, or as much as providing authentication to an application that doesn’t have any. In the case of the HackTheBox machine, this was the case. The application uses Next Auth as its authentication provider. In an incredibly oversimplified piece of pseudocode, authentication in this application looks like this (forgive me im not a javascipt developer).

01. Intro#

I use ZFSBootMenu to manage my boot environments and help me roll back when I inevitably do something destructive to my system. Today I decided to change my encryption password because my current one has a key combination that confused my fingers so I almost always typed it incorrectly the first time. I changed my zfs rpool password, but I neglected to update initramfs. Im documenting the steps to properly change my password here so that i dont forget.

01. Intro#

I was doing the Password Attacks lab in hackthebox academy and I found it pretty interesting so I figured I would redo it and step through how I did it and my thought process to help solidify concepts and because I enjoyed this one, even though it was a bit frustrating initially.

02. Gathering Initial Info#

To start this engagement we know a couple things. We have a user Betty Jade that works at Nexura LLC. We also have a password for the user <REDACTED> with a reasonable assumption that she reuses passwords. We also have the scope of this engagement with the following devices:

Today I was looking at something new to learn and I came accross some material on DLL Hijacking. Previously I was only really aware of DLL search order hijacking, but I was interested to see that theres actually several varients to this idea. It may be best to first explain what a DLL is before talking about methods of manipulation. A DLL is a shared object or a snippet of code that several applications and operating system components can import for many common functions as to not have to re-invent the wheel on many things. Since many vital applications and operating system components need these DLLs, there is an opportunity for arbitrary code execution if you can somehow influence an application to load your DLL. There are many techniques to do so, many of them are very similar so I categorize them as such:

Today I was looking into some stuff for SSH and I wanted to know more about the maths behind how diffie helman works and since its just always something I took for granted so today I learned. Below is a simple graphic that I made that illustrates the process of the key exchange.

So what does this mean? Well asymetric cryptography is built upon the idea of creating a shared secret independently without passing it over the public internet. Diffie-Helman arised as a method of doing so. So how does this work you ask? Our first subject Alice comes up with a random number, for illustration purposes this number is small, but his is usually a very large number. Bob indenpendently does the same, both of these numbers are unique and never shared and will be regfered to as a private key. What is shared are two other numbers g and n, these numbers can be whatever as long as g is small and prime and n is very large. These numbers will be used in a mathematcal function to create something they can share, a piblic key. This public key can easily be derived if you have the private key, but the math doesnt work that well the other way around, this is due to the modulus operation. Modulus is simply the remander left over after a number is divided into another one evenly as many times as possibly. It is improbable for me to know how many times the number fit into the other one cleanly with just the remainder without simply guessing every possibility. If our private keys and n operator are large enough, this will again be very impractical. The colors here are to represent that our numbers as they are combined. While I know that yellow is in the public domain and alice’s public key is orange, i dont know the exact shade of red or quantity that she used to make this orange which would make it very difficult to replicate without trial and error.

So I didn’t do anything today so I’m going to take today to write about NixOS. I started using NixOS recently because I would like to incorporate declarative and immutable operating systems into my research. I was introduced to NixOS via one of my favorite podcasts Linux Unplugged. I wasn’t initially sold on it because it sounded like a fad, but so far its pretty cool. This is how I understand it.

Hello, this is the beginning of my (somewhat) daily blog. The intention of this blog is less of an exercise in writing about my life and more of a exercise in making a habit of documentation. I plan to write daily about lessons I learned about computers that day and I’m sure there will be a non-computer related blog or two. When I implement tagging and search, I will make sure that things are tagged appropriately. Now let’s get into the first blog post: