BinPack Origins

2010-07

For a couple years now, I’ve been maintaining a set of portable Windows software so that I could easily have a standard set of tools at my disposal to any system I was using. At the time, it was only for myself and I manually added and deleted programs, and built a menu system so everything is clean. It was really quite useful because I had several different computers and several different VM environments in use on a recurring basis, and not having to install all those programs on each system was a huge time saver.

Eventually, word got around and other people started to use it, and of course, the program requests came in. Some wanted more, but many wanted less. They didn’t need my full set of tools that I used, and really only needed a few choice tools. But since it was still easier to just take my kit instead of finding the tools they wanted and installing them manually, they usually ended up using my solution.

After about a year of this and still manually updating the kit, I had to take a step back and think about the actual problem to develop a better solution. It turned out that there were several portable application suites like liberkey and portableapps, but they are more catered to common utilities. Not only did they not include everything I used, there was a huge gap of security tools supported by those suites.

In the end I determined it was easier to develop a brand new framework to get applications and it was modeled like Debian’s apt-get system. There is a gui to manage the programs you want to put on a system, and because they are all portable binaries, you could move those same apps around to other systems to have your own custom environment.

The framework is very stable, and there are already 400+ programs in the repository already. Out of the whole repository, there are over 100 security tools like metasploit, nmap, wireshark, nikto, pwdumpx, and cain & abel. The tool will be released in Las Vegas during Black hat / DEFCON / Security B-Sides, and we will have copies of the live portable environment to give away on disc.

Stay tuned for more info about this new unique tool. I really think it will be useful to many people in our industry.