ClockingIt Screenshot

ClockingIt is a web based app which allows users to manage their project online. It has all the features needed for getting things done and to smoothly run the project. Apart from the ‘must have’ features like issue tracking and charts, this app features email notification, forums, chat etc which helps the users to communicate and share the info at a centralized location.

Video

ClockingIt Walkthrough

Tracking

Issue tracking is very easy with ClockingIt and can be done with few steps.

1. Add new Client
2. Create a New Project to the Client added (Step1)
3. Add users to the project
4. Click on New Task from the Menu
   

   NewTask Page (Screenshot from my previous site)

5. Submit the task details, priority, type and attach files, if any
6. Create Milestones from ‘Target section in newtask option
7. Assign the new task (Step 5) to appropriate milestone (step 6).

Dashboard

Click on overview button (acts like a dashboard)

• Drag the widgets to organize and arrange as needed
• Create new widget by specifying the type of it
• We can easily mark the tasks complete directly and the graphs will be updated instanly

Charting & Reporting

Click on GANTT chart from Schedule Menu. This chart extracts the data from the ‘Time Estimate’ option present in the ‘New Tasks’ page. Any change in the time duration for the particular task is immediately reflected on the GANTT chart.

Click on the report tab to run reports of various type like Pivot, Workload, Timesheet and Audit.

Features

• Task filters
• Milestones
• Timeline & Time tracking
• Calendar
• Graphs & GANTT charts (Ajax based)
• Drag & Drop organizing
• Notes & Comments
• Reports
• CSV Export
• Group chat / transcripts
• Instant messaging
• Email alerts
• RSS & iCal feeds
• File storage (for screenshots)
• Private Forum & Wiki for collaboration

Go to

Note: This post is moved from my site previous site http://31nst31n-in-me.com (decommissioned now) hence the screenshots are also taken from that site.

From this…

To this…

Step 1 – PrintScreen

Capture the required screen. We will be cropping this image at the later steps, so make sure that the region captured is more than what is required.

1. Screen Capture

Step 2 – Arrange the layers

Open this image in Gimp and duplicate the background layer clicking the ‘Duplicate Layer’ at the bottom of the Layers window. Also create a ‘New Layer’ and select ‘White’ in the ‘Layer Fill Type’ options. Order and rearrange the layers as shown below.

2. Arrange Layers

Step 3 – Apply Video Filter

Select the top layer and apply the ‘Video’ effect from [Filters - Distorts - Video]. Select ‘Striped’ in the Video pattern.

3. Apply Video Filter

Step 4 – Change the Perspective

The actual story begins here… Use the ‘Perspective Tool’ (Shift+P) change top layer to a 3D like image. Click the transform button once you are satisfied with the perspective.

4. Change Perspective

Step 5 – Crop the Image

We can notice the background white layer visible beneath the top layer. No crop the image so that most of the white layer portion is removed.

5. Crop Image

Step 6 – Duplicate Layer

We wont be concerned about the top layer in the subsequent steps. Duplicate the top layer and lets us apply some effects on the new top layer.

6. Duplicate Layer

Step 7 – Blur Layer

Apply ‘Gaussian Blur’ from [Filters - Blur- Gaussian] menu and set the blur radius as shown below.

7. Blur Layer

Step 8 – Layer Mask

Add a Layer Mask on the top layer and select ‘White (full opacity’ option as shown below.

8. Add Layer Mask

Step 9 – Gradient Opacity

Select the White Layer Mask found next to the top layer in the Layers window and click the ‘Blend Tool’.  Select gradient FG to BG and make sure you have selected the foreground and background colors as white and black. Click and drag your mouse from the bottom left corner to the center of the image as shown.

9. Gradient Blend

Step 10 – Blend Overlay

We are almost done. To make the image look more realistic we have to apply gradient again but on a new layer. Change the opacity of the top layer to about 20%. This will create an ‘shade’ found while clicking pic of the LCD display.

10. Gradient Overlay

Practice with different variations and try adding detail to make more realistic.

And here is the final image…

The Final Screen Capture

Download Gimp :

Enter any test string to get the error message.

Search for the referenced text strings and locate the message displayed in the error box. After analyzing the text references we find that there are no hardcoded keys or presence of any fragments of keys.

We have Double click to open the CPU window and set breakpoint by pressing ‘F2′

Check whether there are any new strings generated at the CPU window (and trust me you wont find any ). Now check the memory stack and scroll to the instruction where the userid we have entered is displayed. If you scroll a bit down you can find a ‘Key Like’ string below the userid string. Try to enter that in the key field, it should work.

There is no point in finding out the key without understanding the logic behind the generation of the key. Once if we find the logic, we can reverse engineer and create a distributable keygens.

We can segregate the userid and corresponding key values as follows

t – D8
e – C9
s – D7
t – D8
e – None
r – None

Now open ‘calc’ in scientific mode – Select Hex mode – Type D8

Select Dec mode to convert HEX value to Decimal.

Note down the corresponding Decimal value for each HEX equivalent.

Now open any asciichart and note down the ascii value for the userid chars.

We can notice a difference of 100 between the converted HEX value and ascii value of the userid.

So we can derive the logic to create our own Keygen

Logic Sequence

1. Take the 4 four characters of the username
2. Convert chars to corresponding decimal value
3. Add 100 to the decimal value obtained in step 2
4. Covert this to HEX and the Key is obtained!

CrackMe App Download : Alt:

Video

Conclusion: Always use a multilevel, complex logic to derive your own key. Always advised to use any standard encryption algorithm to generate the key used for comparison.

Note: The apps used in the tutorials are downloaded from the DeathSpawn Website (Not working anymore ) and detailed ‘How-to’ is can be read from the text file which is present along with the app package.

References

• OllyDbg Homepage – http://www.ollydbg.de/
• Death Spawn OllyDdg Tutorials – http://www.geocities.com/imdeathspawn/ (Doesn’t seem to work now)
• ASCII Chart – http://www.asciichart.com/
• UPX packing utility – http://upx.sourceforge.net/

Enter any test data and observe the error message displayed.

Search for referenced text strings as mentioned in Tutorial-1. Scroll to the location shown below.

Notice the 2 ‘Key like’ strings in the text strings referenced. If you think that one of them is valid, then you are wrong, but then why and where is it used? And what is the correct key? We can find that out soon.
Double click the message ‘The serial you entered is not correct’ to reach the instruction location in the CPU window. When we analyze the code we come across a few concatenations operations. But unfortunately the keys are concatenated with blanks and finally compared with the user input.

The blank values you see in the comments are not really blank ones. They values are assigned on runtime. We have to set a breakpoint to obtain the dynamic assigned value.

To set a breakpoint, select the instruction and press ‘F2′. Breakpoints highlighted in red over the memory location.

Press the ‘Play’ button to run the crackme application. Enter any random data and click the ‘Check’ button. The application pauses at the breakpoint set in the previous step. Go to the same location where you saw the 2 suspicious ‘Key Like’ strings in the previous step.

Just before where the breakpoint was set we can find a new long string value displayed instead of blank strings which was displayed earlier. If you reverse engineer now, you can understand that the 2 Keys ‘L2C-5781‘ and ‘4562-ABEX‘ are static ones and are prefixed and suffixed, respectively, with a dynamically generated string. This is what we were looking for; the correct key to this app.

CrackMe App Download : Alt :

Video

Conclusion : Never hardcode even fragments of static keys which can be helpful to deduce the complete key. Use some kind of logic to generate a dynamic key value.

Introduction

Ollydbg mainly has 4 windows in the default layout. CPU Window, Registers, Memory Stack and HEX Dump window. We will be working on CPU window most of the time.

OllyDbg Download :

A set of 3 tutorials illustrated here explains on how effectively can OllyDbg be used to identify the security holes and to ensure that the code written is healthy.

Tutorial 1 – Unpack the compressed exe & Find the hardcoded password

First step is to get a picture of how application works by submitting some random data, understanding the sequence of dialog boxes displayed and analyzing it. This might serve useful at later point of time. Enter some random test string in the CrackMe application and click ‘Check the Serial’. Note down the message displayed in the alert box.

Drag and Drop the CrackMe app to OllyDbg to disassemble the binary. As a thumb rule, always do Right click – Search for – All referenced text strings, first, to obtain any text string being used in the application so that we can directly jump into the required memory location. The ‘messages’ displayed in the alert box while a wrong key is entered, or any other info displayed while navigating the application are nothing but plain strings stored and being referred by a particular instruction which can be called as required.

Once the search is complete, results are displayed; and unfortunately displays no useful info after disassembling the app. Ideally it should have the message displayed, while that wrong value was entered, referred somewhere in the application. You must have noticed that an alert was displayed when the app was opened in OllyDbg which gives some hint that the application is compressed. This is the reason why Ollydbg is not disassembling the code properly.

So inorder to proceed further, we must uncompress/unpack the application. Here, UPX is used for packaging the app so we must use an option in UPX to decompress the app. (Download the UPX from here)

Unpacking with UPX

Copy the app exe into the same folder where UPX exe is present.

Open cmd and use the ‘decompress’ option

upx -d CrackMe2.exe

Try ‘Search for’ – ‘All referenced text strings’ again.

Now we can see the comments and referenced string values in the results window. Scroll down to location where you can see these strings in the below screenshot. Double click to get to the location in the CPU main window. If you reverse engineer the logic we can find that ‘12011982‘ is the string which is compared before ‘Trial CrackMe Cracked‘ is displayed or called. (Check the tutorial found in the app zip for detailed info). Even otherwise, on the first shot itself we can do a ‘Trail and Error’ method and guess that ’12011982′ is the key.

Conclusion : Never hardcode the static key in the code to compare the user input key.

CrackMe app download : Alt:

Video

Most of the applications we use everyday are available for download in Installable format and during installation, it’s dependent files are distributed across various locations in our harddisk. Moving the executable to another folder/drive might even prevent its proper functioning. And in some cases, uninstalling those apps will leave behind few files which were copied during installation. So we will minimize these problems by running portable versions of the apps.

To convert the Installer version of our app to portable we need to use an extractor. One of the best free extractor available is Universal Extractor which can help us in creating portable apps. Universal Extractor first detects the type of compression and packaging used to build the installer and extracts with the help of suitable mechanisms. It currently supports 50+ formats including Windows Installer, Inno Setup, NSIS package etc which are the most commonly used.

Extracting the Installer file with UniExtract

1. Drag and drop the Installer executable file onto the Universal Extractor App. Set the destination directory.
2. Click Ok to proceed. Now the installation package will be detected and extracted accordingly.
3. Now try to execute the app, if it works fine*, remove unnecessary files like uninstall scripts, start menu shortcuts, if any, from the extracted folder. Now you have your portable version of your app ready to be moved to your thumb drive.

Note* : Not all the applications can be converted to portable ones. Some installer package might not be understood by the uniextractor and some apps depends and run by modifying certain registry files.

Download Universal Extractor

(More info here)