Adventures In Cybersecurity

This is the first post about my current full homelab setup Heres a picture of the server rack in its "Server room" (AKA my second closet) Here are the machines, and their specs, from the top of the rack down: Creality CR-10: My biggest 3d printer. Modified with adjustable tension on the X and Y axis. Dell R710: 2x Xeon X5650, 16gb ECC DDR3, 1x 4tb drive Use: Running ProxMox with Plex, PiHole and several flavors of linux. Dell R715: 2x 12 core Opterons, 48gb ECC DDR3, 1x 120gb boot SSD, 2x 1tb drives Use: Proxmox with Windows Server VMs and FreeBSD Cisco Catalyst 2950 series switch: Connects "Server Room" to my apartment's router. Dell 2161DS-2 KVM: I love this thing. before I got it, I had to manually shuffle cables between servers, now I can switch between servers with 3 buttons. I do not have the KVM-Over-Ip functionality at the moment due to its Java webapp being completely out of date. Generic Ebay PDU: While not the best, it is substa

So I've been gradually accumulating hardware for my homelab setup. The newest addition is an IBM X3550 m2, with a pair of quadcore xeons. Im planning to turn it into a bit of an overpowered NAS, and use my VPN provider's dedicated IP service to be able to interact with it outside of my apartment. Today, I received the system, test booted it, and upgraded the RAM to 32gb.

For the past few months, I've been experimenting with hardening thinkpad against attacks and trying to reduce attack surfaces as much as possible. One thing I've been meaning to do for a while is install coreboot + seaBIOS as the T420, t430, and x220, the machines I've been working with, are all supported. I disassembled the test t420 today, removed the motherboard, and located the flash chip. Unfortunately a low-quality soic-8 clip prevented me from being able to flash the bios. Hopefully the new one coming tomorrow will fix that.

So this is the first post of what I hope will be a rather informative cybersecurity / technological projects blog. I should probably start by introducing myself, I'm Harry Brennan, I'm a Purdue cybersecurity student and an independent cybersecurity researcher. I've conducted research into the security of voting machines (Specifically the Diebold AccuVote TSX), worked on hardening laptops against known and suspected vulnerabilities, and like to tinker with things in my spare time. I build and fly drones, and like working on old cars in my free time.