Post IETF103 Hackathon project work.

I finally completed my second open-source project on a sunday afternoon healing from the long hike I had the day before with my team at Linkbynet. A hike of 7km across the south coast of Mauritius.


One week has already passed by and I was still working on the putty project for the IETF103 which was deprecating RC4 from the source code.

At first we had difficulty to compile the source code but later on we found another tarball for the source code with which we successfully compiled the code.

I setup a vm with centos 7 on it with on old version of openssh-server (6.2) which had support for the rc4 encryption. Then i used the compiled version of putty and try to connect to the server, analyzing the communication with wireshark in the background. With some trials I found the rc4 encryption in the encryption exchange list.

After that success, I spent another night removing all traces of rc4 in the source code. It was with a lot of investigations and debugging that I removed rc4 from the source code.

Now the next step was to re-compile the code and see if the application still works and if rc4 has disappeared. But as always compiling code is not an easy job. I ran through some bugs which led to several failed attempts. However with some observation and debugging I solved the issue and it finally compiled without any errors.

To finally say "eureka" some testing has to be done to see if rc4 does not appear while trying to connect to the server.

 

As we can see from the pictures, the result was satisfying. No more rc4 in the source code of putty and it is now safer to use. Here is the link to my github.

See you on my next project.