Hacker skills in action

Have you ever needed to use your 1337 hacker skills in real life as a non-security professional?

I was once given the task of writing a Windows library to connect to a Juniper VPN system. All I was given was just the web interface of the system. A task that cannot be completed without reverse-engineering skills.

Some experiments with the system showed me that the VPN system wasn't too complicated. After the user authorizes himself via the login page, an ActiveX or Java applet will be launched, which will subsequently download and run a Windows application that is responsible for the VPN connection.

Authenticating via the login page programmatically to retrieve the cookie for the session was a trivial task. For downloading and running the Windows VPN application, with my 1337 Java skills, I decided that reverse-engineering the Java applet was the way to go. After decompiling the applet with Jad, all I needed to do was modifying the code to make it run in a "simulated" applet environment, and everything went on smoothly.

Some updates

So I updated my kernel to 2.6.29.1, however the computer failed to boot. Probably there were some changes in the system structure. I guess I'll stick with 2.6.27 for a little more.

On the bright side, I have finally managed to find a way to connect to vpn from my Linux box. At first I went through the trouble of installing the Cisco VPN client for Linux, but no matter how hard I tried it couldn't connect to the gateway. Next I tried OpenVPN, but it didn't seem to be compatible either. In the end I tried vpnc. It was impossible to get it to work using certificate authentication, however group authentication worked fine ;)

Now probably there'll be no big changes until Mandriva Linux 2010 comes out!