Show HN: I made my Raspberry Pi a secret phone homing server

These things are fun, and certainly not new. You can buy devkits that already look quite unobtrusive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

The one in this article looks like a fire hazard. I guess that's one way to cover your tracks :P

A few suggestions:

SCP'ing the public key directly to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys could overwrite the file if it already exists. It's better to use 'ssh-copy-id', which takes care of everything for you. Most distros should have it already.

Autossh can take care of setting up, monitoring, and restarting the tunnels for you. Arguments are almost exactly the same as ssh, just toss it into your crontab and have it run @reboot.

Setting I2P up on the RPi then setting ssh up to listen on a I2P hidden service on the RPi would be better than the method shown. That way if the device is discovered it would be impossible to trace back the actual IP address of the person connecting to it and an adversary obtaining your ssh key wont be able to log into any of your servers.

Check out this presentation from DerbyCon about using a cheap NAS to do something similar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxdm86r26Co Irongeek has a writeup about the same thing here: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/svartkast-pogopl... and some instructions to do it specifically on an RPi: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/raspberry-pi-i2p...

A tor hidden service with ssh is a great way to set up a reverse tunnel:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en

For the purpose of physical drop boxes, there are much better tools than a Pi. For example this one http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n is cheaper (< $20), smaller, much more power efficient, and comes with WiFi! Strip the wrapping plastic box and you can hide it practically anywhere with batteries powering it for days.

"Now I am on a computer in someone elses network. Woohoo! Now I can do remote tech support more effectively."

Great line. Now, if only the NSA were as helpful with its remote tech support.

Is the power adapter board sitting on top of the Pi? They should be separated by some panel to avoid shortcircuits and/or feeding mains power into it. It looks like there's enough space too.

Here's a similar project based on another similar project that's been around for quite some time: http://penturalabs.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/blue-for-the-pin...

Original project: http://hakshop.myshopify.com/products/wifi-pineapple

Cool project, I've thought about doing something similar and bought a gumstix for roughly this reason before the Pis were out (although power is harder to figure out on Gumstix).

Slightly ominous line: "I have this plugged into an office somewhere."

This "attack vector" is relying on the fact that you get physical access to the targets router/switch, so you can connect to the network and I think network admins would stop extra PSU in their networking closet pretty fast.

Which started me thinking... What if you would build RPi or similar small device into a router's casing and made it act like a router on the same time. Obviously you'd have to have some way of copying configs over from the old box to the impostor box, but it could be harder to spot since there wouldn't be any extra hardware.

Nice, now I can read all those memos/meeting reminders from th e comfort of home.

Someone who finds the brick can ssh into his server... that seems weird.

443 is a better outgoing port since https is rarely going to be blocked

The use of physical drop boxes placed behind a firewall is nothing new. There is in fact a specific Linux distro for the Rasberry Pi targeted at this use case (see pwnpi.sourceforge.net). It comes packaged with a large suite of penetration testing tools. While building from scratch is a useful exercise for engineers, reinventing the wheel does not merit much attention.