We wrote about keylogging in this article, and used gcc and Linux to intercept and decode a key push via the parallel port. We have also written in the past about various homebrew projects where a limited development system would be very useful. The perfect platform for many of these projects is discarded PCs that can’t run a full OS well. There is a project called uClibc that provides a stripped down version of glibc, a gcc compiler, and a full set of OS utilities. We will show how to bring up various stand-alone versions of this in the future; however, we will give you a taste of what this project can provide in this article.

We used the root_fs-i386.bz2, avalable here. This is an ext2 filesystem image that we can uncompress, mount, and chroot to:

root@srv-1 u-1 # bzip2 -d root_fs-i386.bz2
root@srv-1 u-1 # mount -t ext2 -o loop ./root_fs-i386 /mnt
root@srv-1 u-1 # chroot /mnt
root@srv-1 / # du
0       ./lost+found
2111    ./bin
8       ./etc/init.d
130     ./etc
.
.
.
52146   ./usr
0       ./var/lib
0       ./var/empty
0       ./var
0       ./dev/pts
0       ./dev
57138   .
root@srv-1 / #

OK. That is pretty cool. An entire system under 58 megs. Now, to build a standalone system, we will need a kernel and some other stuff, and we will do this in other articles. What we really want to know, though, is could this system compile the keylog program:

 
root@srv-1 / # gcc logkey.c
root@srv-1 / # ./a.out
Q
root@srv-1 / #

Oh yeah! Stay tuned. More to come.