Home on Francesco

Implementing "networking.tor" in NixOS

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

During the years, I’ve been struggling to build the perfect onion routing system. The idea of producing only noise for network observers has always been fascinating. You know, surfing the web knowing no one knows who you are and stuff. On top of that, I just rewrote the entire Tor protocol back in 2015, so it might just be an obsession.

You could say, “bro, relax, no one is watching you.” Yes… but not actually. During my career, I had the opportunity to use some very costly instrumentation that made me able to track down threat actors to their home IP addresses. Such software is built on a massive, global-scale data collection process.

Relaying NFS4 from inside a container

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I recently set-up a docker swarm and was so excited!

The first thing I learnt was that to operate a swarm you needed a sort of network storage or a highly available storage.

NFS4 was the winner for me and a NFS VM was created and shares were made for hosting docker volumes, what could go wrong?!

Well, at first everything seemed fine, but as some of you may know, setting up auth on NFS is a bit painful, at least for me it is. By default there is no authentication and access control is demanded to IP whitelisting. Okay cool.

Creating a 60Hz European copy of Ape Escape

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Moved to: Creating a 60hz European copy of Ape Escape

Creating a 60Hz European copy of Ape Escape

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Ape Escape is a famous PlayStation One game released in 1999 by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

Games released for PSX were created in three versions: NTSC, PAL and JP.

As most of you may know, back in 1999, PAL games were about 17% slower than their NTSC/JP counterparts, because our European televisions were slower (50Hz). On top of that game creators based their FPS, physics and all that stuff on the CPU clock instead of some timer. I actually don’t know much about the MIPS processor (used in the PSX), but AFAIK some games can be accelerated just by simulating a NTSC console.

Code Injection Techniques in Windows OS: A Step-by-Step Guide

Sun, 27 May 2018 14:13:22 +0000

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to describe one of the most basic code injection techniques by using some of the APIs provided by the Windows operating system for process interaction.

Code injection can be used in case it is necessary to make the detection of a payload more difficult within a compromised system, because it should not be sought inside a single process. It is possible to find an example of a more sophisticated use of the above technique into the “migrate” (ReflectiveLoader) feature of meterpreter, which completely moves the execution of the agent into a process chosen by the attacker.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ciao!

I am Francesco Pompò, an independent IT Security Researcher and Developer.

I enjoy breaking things and seeing how they are made. I also like to produce documentation about it.

Sometimes I break things that nobody cares about, and that is as funny as it sounds.

I like to learn about topics related to my field of interest; I can’t help but keep assimilating information about any matter concerning IT security. This, for example, led me to rewrite the client portion of Tor as a PoC and to build a network scanner.