Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Overview of this book

This book is for all mischievous Raspberry Pi owners who’d like to see their computer transform into a neat spy gadget to be used in a series of practical pranks and projects. No previous skills are required to follow along, and if you’re completely new to Linux, you’ll pick up much of the basics for free. We’ll help you set up your Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 and guide you through a number of pranks and secret agent techniques that are so inconspicuous yet high on mischief. You’ll learn how to configure your operating system for maximum mischief and start exploring audio, video, or Wi-Fi techniques. We’ll show you how to record, listen, or talk to people from a distance and how to set up your own phone network. Then, you’ll plug in your webcam and set up a motion detector with an alarm and find out what the other computers on your Wi-Fi network are up to. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, we’ll combine them with a battery pack and GPS for the ultimate off-road spy kit.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Keeping your data secret with encryption


In this section, we'll create a file container, you can think of it as a vault, and we encrypt whatever is put inside. As long as the vault is unlocked, files can be added to or deleted from it just like any regular filesystem, but once we lock it, no one will be able to peek inside or guess what's in the vault.

This technique will give you an encrypted vault mounted under a directory. You can then add files to it as you wish, and once locked, you can copy it and open it up in Windows.

We'll be using a tool called cryptsetup that will help us create and manage the encrypted containers:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install cryptsetup
  1. First, we need to create an empty file to hold our vault. Here you'll have to decide how much storage space to allocate to your vault. Once created, you won't be able to increase the size, so think about what kind of files you plan to store and their average size. Use the following command, but replace [size] with the...