On Thursday we celebrated the 3th edition of our annual crypto workshop. This year we extended the workshop to more stuff related to data security in general.

So we started with an speech about viruses. Javier Muñoz Mellid , from Igalia, got out prejudices about viruses showing it as engineering works, then he showed some examples of code. Finally, he explained the different characteristics of privative and free antivirus programs. We have an interesting round of questions after. As user of GNU/Linux and BSD systems, I usually don’t get worry about viruses, but I think they’re fascinating pieces of code

The caffeine didn’t help me enough. I passed the previous days sleeping 3-4 hours per day. So I think the clearest idea from my speech about data recovering was make backups! I tried to give ordered ideas and tools to use in case of data loosing. Finally I made two examples, metadata-based recovery with The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy, using Necromantux, of course, and data carving with foremost. The first test was ok, but the second failed and I only recovered part of the information I tried to do on an ext3 filesystem

After a pleasant lunch with my colleages of GPUL and my guest Capitain Pedro Varela, from the Spanish Army, I speedy showed dm-crypt in the daily use of ciphering file systems.

Then David Fernandez Vaamonde surprised us once again in a two-part speech. He teached us how to build an cryptographic token, then he gave an introduction to steganography. On videoconference. Bearing 40º C in Alcalá de Henares.

Finally Mauro Silvosa Rivera showed practical aspects on securing data: he built software RAID 1 and RAID 5 servers with GNU/Linux, then he introduced us in the use of DAR as differential backup tool in large systems. The funniest moment was when Mauro teared off a hard disk, then the system reorganized again.

The photos, again, by Fid, in my gallery
And this was the latest GPUL event in this course, I think. Maybe linux picnic?