tag: Howto

I was looking through the various options for ncat and came across an option I hadn’t seen before: Broker mode. After reading through the examples, I learned that the --chat mode is really just a special mode of connection brokering. In ncat, “brokering” a connection allows multiple connections to the same listening instance, and takes the input from one connection and send it as output to all the other connections. The ncat chat server adds labels to who said what to help keep the confusion down, but in every other way, it is simply a brokered connection. ...

I originally posted this entry on our family’s Wordpress blog, back in 2015. I decided to update and repost the content here, since it’s still relevant and it fits better here anyway… miniLock is no longer actively maintained and is no longer recommended as an encrypton option. There are lots of different ways to encrypt a file and today I want to cover one of the more obscure, and I believe more unique methods. ...

We’ve already seen the usefulness of ncat, including ncat SSL sessions and running chat servers. Now we address the potential issue of unintended users of our listening ncat sessions. Why would you want to limit access to an ncat listener? If you’re competing in a Capture the Flag event and you’ve managed to establish an ncat listener, it would be no good to take a host you worked so hard to gain and gice it away to the other competitors. ...

Sometimes a quick and easy channel for communication can come in handy. ncat has a nice option for just such a chat server. Start it up Start the server using the -l and --chat flags: ubahmapk@laptop:~ > ncat --chat -l -p 8888 Note that you will not see any of the chat traffic in this window, but if you add the -v flag, you will at least see the connections as they are established: ...

ncat is a full rewrite from the nmap team of the traditional netcat (nc) network “Swiss Army Knife”. ncat is full of really slick new features, but the one I will cover here is the ability to do all the wonderful things nc could do, but over an SSL connection. (Yes, yes, yes: I should call it a TLS connection instead, but since the ncat documentation still refers to it as “SSL”, I will do the same here.) ...