BeagleBone Black inspires embedded hackers in different ways. Some see it as a controller board for a small robot, while others see it as a low-power, network server. In this book, we'll treat BeagleBone Black as a defender of personal security and privacy. Each chapter will discuss a technology and then provide a project to reinforce the concept.
Let's get started!
Chapter 1, Creating Your BeagleBone Black Development Environment, starts the journey by showing you how to set up Emacs to maximize your embedded hacking.
Chapter 2, Circumventing Censorship with a Tor Bridge, walks through how to transform the BeagleBone Black into a Tor server with a front panel interface.
Chapter 3, Adding Hardware Security with the CryptoCape, investigates biometric authentication and specialized security chips.
Chapter 4, Protecting GPG Keys with a Trusted Platform Module, shows you how to use the BeagleBone Black to safeguard e-mail encryption keys.
Chapter 5, Chatting Off-the-Record, details how to run an IRC gateway on the BeagleBone Black to encrypt instant messaging.
Appendix, Selected Bibliography, lists the referenced works cited throughout the book.
This book contains several independent projects that use various software packages and hardware components. All the software is open source, and installation instructions are given throughout the chapter. A list of all the necessary hardware is maintained as a SparkFun Electronics wish list at https://www.sparkfun.com/wish_lists/93119. Each chapter will list the required components for that project, so it's best to first read the chapter and then collect the necessary hardware.
If you have an interest in individual security and privacy on the Internet, then you hopefully should enjoy this book. If you have a security background but are new to embedded computing, then you should find the projects challenging but rewarding. Conversely, if you are versed in electronics and are working with GNU/Linux distributions but haven't studied the security technologies mentioned in this book, then you should appreciate the discussions of the technologies in each chapter.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The LCD, controlled by the FrontPanelDisplay class, writes to the serial port, /dev/ttyO4, on BBB's UART 4 at 9600 baud."
A block of code is set as follows:
self.clear_screen()
up_str = '{0:<16}'.format('Up: ' + self.block_char * up)
dn_str = '{0:<16}'.format('Down: ' + self.block_char * down)
self.port.write(up_str)
self.port.write(dn_str)When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
import Adafruit_BBIO.UART as UART
import serial
class FrontPanelDisplay(object):
def __init__(self):
self.uart = 'UART4'
UART.setup(self.uart)
self.port = serial.Serial(port="/dev/ttyO4", baudrate=9600)
self.port.open()Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Mar 25 21:37:43.000 [notice] Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like client functionality is working. Mar 25 21:37:43.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 100%: Done.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To connect to your bridge, launch the Tor browser and click on Open Settings as it starts up."
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