April 23, 2024
The melting plastic and the smoke # The PinePhone keyboard contains a battery, which will be used to charge the PinePhone when the keyboard is attached. Althrough there are existing warnings on the pine64 wiki which sums up to ‘don’t charge or connect anything to your pinephone’s type C interface when the keyboard is attached’, my two pinephone keyboards still managed to fry themselves, with one releasing stinky magic smoke and the other melting the plastic around the pogo pins on the pinephone backplate.
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April 20, 2024
I didn’t take as much notes on day 2 and 3, so I merged them into a single article.
Wednesday, 17 Apr 2024 # Keynote: How Adversaries Use AI # Adversaries:
Nation States Ecrime Hactivism Not always clearly separated LLM can help eliminate common language mistakes, perform better social enginerring
Many adversaries are trying to integrate LLMs into their workflow, with varying results
Time frame from initial foothold to lateral movements is getting shorter, due to better toolings?
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April 16, 2024
sched_ext - Write your own Linux thread scheduler in BPF # BPF made creating new scheduler simpler
with strong safety guarantee to not break the system, the side effects of bad scheduler are confined. run a binary to enable your scheduler, stop the binary to revert to default Scheduling problem is now more complicated due to increasing complexity of workload/CPU design
BPF provides reliable access to critical data structures inside the kernel
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April 12, 2024
Here you can find a list of links related to my topic which I find useful or just interesting.
Meta # Info page https://2024.everythingopen.au/schedule/presentation/24/
Slides EO2024.Slides.exploring.mobile.linux.security.odp
Recording XXX to be processed
VerityMobile GitHub :: ZhanYF/veritymobile
Demo # Access Measurements from Linux Userland
Sign in to GitLab with fTPM-backed FIDO token
fTPM-backed SSH Identity
Disposable Web Session
OP-TEE # Docs Index and high level introduction # https://optee.readthedocs.io/en/latest/general/about.html
Secure Storage # https://optee.readthedocs.io/en/latest/architecture/secure_storage.html
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November 1, 2023
As an OpenBSD package maintainer, I often need to watch for updates on packages I maintain. I used to do this using repology.org, which has the benefit of tracking package updates in many distros, but it can be unreliable for OpenBSD packages due to network delay and parsing problems.
One better way to watch for upstream update is using OpenBSD’s portroach service, it monitors new upstream release and provides a JSON API that can be combined with jq(1) to produce clear information.
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October 21, 2023
git-annex(1) is a versatile and cross-platform tool build on top of git, it can sync, backup, archive files and provides many useful primitives for building customized workflow and storage system, for example, by combining git-annex with gcrypt, it’s possible to fully encrypt data stored on a remote.
Partially due to its versatility, it has a steeper learning curve than some other tools in this field and it took me some time to figure out how to make it work for me, here is a quick guide that documents my journey.
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August 17, 2023
Doing anything close to the kernel/bootloader on PinePhone almost always requires a serial cable, Pine64 store has premade serial cable available for 7$ USD, but making your own serial cable can be both cheaper and more flexible as a DIY cable can support multiple logic level and pinout configuration.
Parts Overview # You will need:
A 3.5mm audio cable, I got mine from a pair of broken headphone A multimeter for continuity test A USB-Serial adapter, you can get one online for around 3$ USD, make sure it supports 3.
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August 15, 2023
Disclaimer # OpenBSD does not support PinePhone Pro yet and there are real risks involved in running it on your PinePhone Pro now, as such, I do not recommand anyone to do that. You might fry your device due to unsupported power management IC and in a worse case the battery might catch fire due to unconfigured/untested charging safety features.
The purpose of this post is to document how to install OpenBSD on arm64 platforms not fully supported by OpenBSD, and much of this post is not PinePhone-specific, if you intend to follow what documented here, please be mindful about the risks and apply common sense.
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June 23, 2023
Basic Setup # All the tools we need for running VM are already packaged on Mobian, to install them, run:
sudo apt install virt-manager then add your user to the libvirt group:
sudo adduser mobian libvirt Reboot and then run virt-host-validate, it should indicate /dev/kvm exists and is accessible.
Trouble with Heterogeneous Architecture # Trying to start qemu-system-aarch64 with -enable-kvm flag can yield the following, rather unhelpfully worded error:
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June 15, 2023
It’s been a bit more than a week since I start daily driving the PinePhone Pro with Mobian, some parts of my journey are documented here.
IME and Keyboard # Both Phosh and Plasma provide their own work flow for setting up IME and adding extra language support, but so far I’m unable to get Phosh’s ibus-based input system to work with PinYin when using on-screen keyboard. I’m able to install PinYin and Anthy from Phosh’s software center, but those methods only work when used with external keyboard, switching to either of those from on-screen keyboard makes no difference when typing.
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