Post Dual Boot Setup - Kali on Mac

So, one of the setups that I run with is a dual-boot enabled MacBook Air with Kali Linux. Why, you may ask... Well no one really expects a Mac to be running anything other than OSX. So it catches people off guard if they really pay attention to what I'm doing. So far, I've come across only a few issues (like I can't get the internal Wi-Fi card to work, but I'm usually using an Alfa anyways). One such issue was that, upon running updates on the Kali side, grub pushed an update. Normally that's not an issue. However, if your setup is similar to mine, where rEFInd is being used from the OSX side....Well let's just say that grub overwrote rEFInd and now only shows the Kali startup.

Now, I didn't really document how I got everything back to 'normal' (sorry, I'm out of luck now too if that happens again). But the basic steps were to bypass the grub boot, which allowed me to boot into the OSX partition, and re-install rEFInd. The question is, how do you avoid that in the first place? And I *think* I have the answer (I'll know for sure if updates kill my OSX partition again in the future).

Simply put, I *think* that by just putting grub updates on hold might prevent grub from overwriting rEFInd, and therefore allowing you to update both Kali and OSX without issues. How is this done? Well here's what I did:

Boot to Kali Linux
Log in and open a terminal
Enter the following to get a list of the grub packages that could be updated

dpkg --get-selections | grep grub

I had the following:

grub-common
grub-efi-amd64
grub-efi-amd64-bin
grub2-common

Next, lets put them on hold with the following:

apt-mark hold grub-common grub-efi-amd64 grub-efi-amd64-bin grub2-common

With any luck, we shouldn't have any future issues of grub overwriting rEFInd and breaking the overall setup.

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Using Python for GPG/PGP File Encryption - Part 2

Previously we looked at creating keys, importing public and private keys and the overall setup of gnupg with python. This time around, we're going to take a look at file encryption. Overall the file encryption process is fairly general/easy. But it lacks in the area of scaleablilty, ie to start, you'll only be encrypting one file at a time, which can be done outside of Python with ease. The idea of going over everything in Python, is that you can setup a script to encrypt multiple files in a folder (look for that in Part 3). Assumptions; you have python, and python-gnupg installed, and a public key from someone you want to encrypt and send files to imported to your keystore home (see Part 1 for more information here. Let's get started with Python file encryption. Start off by getting into your python shell, and enter the following: >>> import os >>> import gnupg >>> gpg_home = "/path/to/keyfile/.gnupg" >>> gpg = gnupg....

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Facebook and Two-Factor Auth

So in this post, I'm going to go over a quick setup on how to turn of two-factor auth with Facebook. Facebook does some interesting things once you turn on two-factor auth. If you have the app installed on your device, it will push a login code to that device. You can also set this up with SMS and the DUO Mobile app. We'll go over all three here. For a more high-level document on 2-factor auth, see my post HERE . As I've said before, this is not meant to be an in-depth guide, but more of a how-to for those that wouldn't normally think of turning on additional security settings. With that, let's get started: 1) Fist off, log into your Facebook on a computer and go over to the little down arrow in the upper right corner and select Settings. In the settings area, you'll want to select "Security" on the left. 2) In the Security Settings, you'll need to select the Edit button in the "Login Approvals" section. You'll be presented wi...

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