Slashdot Mirror
Covert Channel: ASCII Art Over ICMP
An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever had a particularly lossy Cisco ping, which you were sure was trying to tell you something? I mean, really *tell* you something. Echoart allows you to return a simple ascii art image in response to a Cisco-style ping."
...mostly useless, yet very cool -- much like /. itself.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
So, this is the way to respond to alien life forms, Contact style?
Generally seems like somebody is deperately trying to hang on to the BBS days.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Now we've got to set our firewall to block pings, too, to stop that damn goatse guy . . . . what will the trolls think of next?
When 'hostname poop' isn't enough...
This means that, with the lamefilter installed, ICMP is now more advanced than Slashdot.
and this is the best we get?? All right I admit to being a little let down.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
The Army reading list
nothing special =(
How long do you suppose it'll be before someone starts using this to send an ASCII-art goatse.cx guy in response to pings? It'd give script kiddies looking for backdoors something to think about, at least.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
It works on OS X. I'm so tempted to open up my wireless so people can get a big finger when they ping my machines while wardriving.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Behold the return of ASCII porn!
PingMUD. Anyone wanna help?
A good argument I can use so that damn security dude opens up ICMP on our firewalls.
The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.
I used to browse Slashdot on minimum threshold, until I saw a goatse ASCII image... I'm afraid that such an image might make +5 for this story.
(Actually, this could almost be useful for a SMTP server as a response to spammers. Almost.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Somebody got a mirror? They're LOST!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
with a simple ascii response of a web page to my simple http style request.
Now who said anything about the Easter Bunny?
Generally seems like somebody is deperately trying to hang on to the BBS days.
Well the site is loading as fast as the BBS days so that's somewhat nostalgic right there...
I did up a silly perl script, using curses, that ran an ascii art animation of stick figure A throwing a grenade at stick figure B.
;)
I, the guy that owned the machine, was figure A. The guy trying to telnet to my machine was figure B. After figure B was reduced to a crater I printed some message along the lines of "you aren't welcome here, go away".
Ran it out of hosts.deny and left it up for quite a while. I was bored, sounded more fun than setting up a firewall like I should have.
It worked surprisingly well, even with the windows telnet client.
Now just code a visual TCP three way handshake with ASCII art...then maybe I'll hack the code so the resets from my servers give you an ASCII middle finger!
Who the hell modded this insightful?
Banner(6) is a *nix program which outputs ASCII art of a string, on the standard output.
This program sends packets in a designated pattern, and it can be used to send ASCII art of any kind, over ICMP.
These two programs have almost nothing in common, except that you could probably use banner to create the art for this program.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
This is all I see:
44 0 0 33333
44 00 0 33 33
44 4 0 00 3
44 4 00 00 3 33
444 44 0 0 3
44 0 0 3 33
4 00 00 3333
I guess it works!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
to get spammed! I can see it now, pings which draw out "11VIAGRA CH3AP~!", or "`L00kING 4 L0\/3???"
A lifetime supply of ROFL and LOL! The prize patrol will be with you shortly!
Someone who probably understood what I meant.
These two programs have almost nothing in common, except that you could probably use banner to create the art for this program.
That was my point. This program doesn't seem to be anything but a slightly sophisticated version of 'banner' that is able to intercept and send packets over a Cisco network. As I said before, nothing new ...
Goatse is celebrating his ass off......oh wait
Table-ized A.I.
Slashdot, why have you so poisoned my mind??
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Screw ICMP, I want to see ASCII Art Over ICBM!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Actually, I've been looking for something like this for a bit--does anyone here know of a program that changes a jpeg or other digital photo into an 'old style' ascii art image?
http://www.unixauthority.com/~fiskeja/mirror/mirro r1.internap.com/echoart/
ascii-art or otherwise, to tell me that the site's been /.ed.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Should be able to do something creative with 550 errors in sendmail, here. Can reject messages contain newlines?
This looks neat - but it would help if there was a way to build the ASCII art from text within the program. In the meantime Email Effects will do the trick very nicely.
That was my point. This program doesn't seem to be anything but a slightly sophisticated version of 'banner' that is able to intercept and send packets over a Cisco network. As I said before, nothing new ...
A plane is nothing more than a sophisticated version of a bicycle that has wings and an engine, allowing it to travel longer distances in the air. Nothing new.
The site seems to be down, so appologies if I'm missing something covered in it.
What is a "Cisco-style" ping? Does it differ from normal ping? I'm guessing it must, as conventional ping prints lines of text, not providing a means of drawing ASCII art.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This program doesn't seem to be anything but a slightly sophisticated version of 'banner' that is able to intercept and send packets over a Cisco network. As I said before, nothing new ...
The part that's in bold is the part that's new.
Cretin.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Banner takes text and prints out ASCII art of it.
This takes ASCII art and prints it out on a remote computer using ICMP.
Other than the words "ASCII art" being in both, the two are completely unrelated.
How long until people claim to see the Virgin Mary or some other figure in pings?
Nice spinoff, but not really as much 'in your face' as Goatse is... or maybe I've just gotten used to seeing such pictures >_
Banner is sooo old-fashioned:
~% apt-get install cowsay
...
~% cowsay Moo
_____
< Moo >
-----
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
this revolutioning program also includes the additional utility 'cowthink'.
Fantastic thing, this modern technology!
ok, so you are going to go through all of that trouble to run code like that as root. great idea!
tcpdump -lni dc0 'icmp[0] == 8' | \
while read x input x ip x; do \
nemesis-icmp -v -i 0 -S ${ip//:/} -D $input -P $input_file; \
done
substitute hping or whatever your tool of choice is.
and if you want it to only reply to specific OS's then obsd's tcpdump can do it with -o and an extra condition in the script.
-nocfed
After all, the 'net isn't run only by English writing people, and many line drawing and mathematical characters are not in the ASCII character set.
Anonymous peer to peer? Send ICMP packets padded with the data to google.com/news.bbc.co.uk/any host that returns ICMP echo requests, with spoofed source addresses so the packets bounce back to the person that you're transferring the file to. End result - they have no idea who you are. Couple with a system for saying "I would like file X, and my IP address is w.x.y.z", and you have a untraceable file transfer mechanism.
Discuss.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Actually, maybe it's just me, but the ASCII art version of goatse.cx is no problem at all.
Of course, I've become desensitized to hello.jpg in general. I think it was the prime number shitting version that did it.
Now lets hope they never ASCII up Tubgirl and post her.
(... get a stupid ANSI!)
Reason: Your post looks too much like ascii art.
Can I customize it so that anyone who pings me gets an ASCII finger thrown back at them?
-5 Redundant
A Cisco ping command basically spews out some number of ping packets as fast as possible.
:)
The results then get displayed in order, with a dot displayed for every packet that times out and a ! displayed for every packet that actually gets echoed back.
So the upshot of this is that the echo art program isn't actually sending artwork, it's responding to packets or not responding to packets based on the artwork file you give it, which will cause it to draw the art on the other side, the guy doing the pinging.
Neat trick, actually.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's actually slightly more complex than that..
Cisco style ping: "A '.' is printed for every packet sent and a backspaced '!' for every valid response."
So it prints a . then backspaces over it and prints a ! if it gets a response.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Reading that ascii art made my eyes hurt, The developer should have used some other, more visible ascii characters.
Maybe I'll tweak this one for my MTA to ascii art "SPAM" on all my junk mail.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Did the 'Art' that was put on the page look like crop circles to anyone else?
.sig?
<Tinfoil hat>The aliens have a new way of passing information to the chosen. I saw Mulder ping this site and got a map to the next landing coordiates. If you believe, you can see it.</Tinfoil hat>
Psst. Hey buddy, can I borrow a
The one the author suggests at nikhef
site doesnt have a configuration script so
it wont run make on my RH 7.2 box.
I have the echoart up and ready to go but
im missing the ping program..
damn!
thanks for any help.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
>You had to look at it from like 3 ft away, never did get it.
Target practice. *nods knowingly*
:P
FWIW, I have seen an ASCII Tubgirl on /. before. Can't remember exactly where, but it exists.
gcc -D_BSD_SOURCE ping.c omni.c vers.c -o ping
No, you can't send ASCII art of any kind. What this program does is suppress ping reponses in a particular pattern. If the sending end prints out the (lack of) ping responses, you get a picture. But it's limited to a picture composed of 2 characters -- not any kind of ASCII art.
was using this covert channel I guess... Watch out, feds are behind slashdot readers now..
I m outta here
bin
look siG is kool
And would you believe the hokey firewall the republicans have been trying to sell since Regan? It might do a little filtering, but it doesn't come close to implementing a default deny rule for incoming ICBM traffic!
I've not seen someone use them for art before but they can be used for illicit communications. Heres a program that allows people to use ping packets to chat to each other: icmptalk.c
thank you so much..works like a charm.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -