who are you?

I am an information security engineer with main interests in network security, hardware and radio frequency.

what’s your setup like?

I use an acer c720p Chromebook as my main laptop. I tinkered with it, got rid of the chrome OS and replaced it with archlinux. It’s a nifty little machine that is light and portable. It has a 32GB SSD and about 7 hours of battery life which I love. The processor and ram are not as high as I’d like but it does the job.

For the heavy lifting I have a Samsung laptop which I dual boot Kali Linux and Windows. It’s a core i5 with 6GB ram and Nvidia graphics card, not one of the high end ones though :(. It also has a 750GB hard drive which comes in handy for stuff such as virtual machines and large wordlists.

I also have a raspberry pi model B. I play around with it and use it for experiments and diverse projects. Right now it has Kali Linux on it.

My phone is a Nexus 5 - awesome phone! It serves all my needs and more. I have set up Nethunter on it and it comes in handy in remote testing and exploitation :). I see it remaining as my phone for a long time.

I read a lot and have a Kindle Paperwhite 2. Next to my phone, it’s the device I take almost everywhere with me. Its battery lasts forever and the reading experience is amazing whatever the lighting conditions.

I also have some interest in photography and own a Nikon P520 camera. It serves my casual needs adequately and the zoom - 42x - is awesome!

For storage I have two external drives - 2TB and 500GB. This complements the 750GB on the Samsung laptop. I also have lots of online storage, starting with 1TB Google Drive space - which I got free for two years from the Chromebook purchase :).

The rest of my setup includes miscellaneous devices such as wireless cards, switches and so on.

what tools do you run?

On the acer, I only configure the tools that I use regularly. These are a few crypto and network security tools. I tailor them to my needs to keep my archlinux installation minimal and fast. I do most of my scripting on it, mainly python and shell using sublime text (which i highly recommend) as my editor. I add other tools as they become necessary, on archlinux this is mostly seamless. I’ve added the blackarch and archassault repos which host a wealth of security tools.

As the Samsung laptop has a full Kali Installation, I use it when I need to do automated testing and require speed. I also use it when I need to do GPU password cracking. I also run my VMS on it. I have Windows on it too for games, testing and so on.

The Nexus has Nethunter on it, which I use mostly to run network assessment tools.

What’s your dream setup

Ideally I’d like to have one light, fast, and extremely powerful laptop. Something like; 1TB SSD, 16GB ram and at least 8 hours battery life and of course powerful processor and graphics card.

Next I’d love to setup a multi-GPU cluster machine. Something like this 25-GPU cluster monster. Can i dream :)?

I am very happy with my Nexus 5 so am good there.

Finally, I hope and plan to setup a fully equipped lab with lots of automation. It’ll have very high speed internet and cutting edge technology. I have an interest in communication protocols and technology and it will have a plethora of relevant testing devices. This includes software defined radio devices, antennas, the whole nine yards :). Of course it’ll have powerful processing machines. The lab will basically be used for research and lots of fun!