cipherdyne.org

29 July, 2009

This past week one a good one for Single Packet Authorization with two software releases. First, an initial version of libfko, the all C implementation of SPA developed by Damien Stuart can be downloaded along with documentation. The libfko library allows other programs to easily implement the SPA protocol, and a new C client is bundled with fwknop-c-0.62 as well as a new perl module "FKO" that implements a perl XS extension of libfko functions. Once the fwknopd server piece is also developed (a new replacement fwknop C client is included, but not a replacement for fwknopd yet), the libfko code will allow SPA to easily be extended to systems where perl is either not installed or cannot be run (due to hardware constraints such as small routers running OpenWRT).

fwknop-c follows the standard autoconf method of installing open source software, so just: $ ./configure --prefix=/usr && make
$ su
# make install The new fwknop-c client can be found at /usr/bin/fwknop once you have installed per the above, and all important options are supported similarly to the perl fwknop client. So, the familiar commands like: $ fwknop -A tcp/22 -R -D <host_or_ip> should work just the same. A few of the command line arguments have been changed in the C version, and by default the output on stdout is reduced (just use -v to change this).

Second, a new project called morpheus-fwknop was developed and released by Daniel Lopez. This project is a Windows UI written in .NET to send SPA packets that fwknopd can decrypt. With morpheus-fwknop, there is no need to install Cygwin in order to access services protected by SPA from Windows. This is the first viable UI to succeed Sean Greven's UI developed in Delphi (which still works too!), and morpheus-fwknop is released under the GPL. Naturally, source code can be downloaded, and here are two screenshots that show the look and feel: It is excellent to see work going on in the world of user interfaces to fwknop and SPA. Without an effective UI on Windows, a large user base is effectively cut off.