https://blog.ajsmith.org/ Cybersecurity and digital forensics posts from a GMU student. 2025-06-10T19:14:13-04:00 Andy Smith https://blog.ajsmith.org/ Jekyll © 2025 Andy Smith /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2022-09-30T00:00:00-04:00 2022-09-30T00:00:00-04:00 https://blog.ajsmith.org/posts/Creating-your-own-Certificate-Authority-and-Using-TLS-Client-Certificates-mTLS/ Andy Smith

In this article, I’ll go over how to set up your own public key infrastructure (PKI) by creating a private certificate authority (including both a root and an intermediate CA), creating TLS client certificates for TLS mutual authentication (mTLS), and generating and using code signing certificates. Prerequisites Python 3.8+ A command line Getting Started Whether you’re running interna...

2022-05-11T00:00:00-04:00 2022-05-11T00:00:00-04:00 https://blog.ajsmith.org/posts/Introduction-to-Web-Exploitation/ Andy Smith

In this article, I’ll go over how to start doing web challenges in capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions from the ground up. This is adapted from a talk I gave at MasonCC, the cybersecurity club at George Mason University. What is “Web”? When someone says web, they really just mean communication between a web server and a web client (such as a web browser). There are many different web servers ...

2021-11-28T15:20:00-05:00 2021-11-28T15:20:00-05:00 https://blog.ajsmith.org/posts/Forensic-Analysis-of-Citymapper-for-Android/ Andy Smith

Abstract/BLUF The goal of this project is to analyze the Citymapper app on Android and search for forensic artifacts present in its configuration and storage files. Citymapper is a navigation app focused on pedestrian and public transit navigation in intracity areas. Citymapper only requires a logical extraction to obtain its configuration files and main database. This means that the device do...

2018-07-04T19:24:00-04:00 2018-07-04T19:24:00-04:00 https://blog.ajsmith.org/posts/Useful-Security-Tools/ Andy Smith

This is an incomplete list of some useful security tools. Forensics FTK Imager NTFS imager that lets you browse all data in an NTFS partition. Useful for discovering NTFS-specific data such as security IDs of computers a partition has been connected to. Volatility Memory forensics tool Binwalk Looks for headers inside of files to find data structures or files inside of files. Foremost Sear...

2018-01-27T01:51:53-05:00 2018-01-27T01:51:53-05:00 https://blog.ajsmith.org/posts/PicoCTF-2017-Writeups/ Andy Smith

Forensics Digital Camoflage (50pts) Instructions We need to gain access to some routers. Let’s try and see if we can find the password in the captured network data: data.pcap. Hints It looks like someone logged in with their password earlier. Where would log in data be located in a network capture? If you think you found the flag, but it doesn’t work, consider that the data may be e...