Category: crypto
-
how many factors, anyway?
I’ve been using Google’s 2 factor authentication for awhile now, it’s simple to use and seems effective (and is probalby the most commonly used 2F on earth.) But how many factors is it, really? But perhaps I could try to distill this even a bit more, and go radical… is the 2nd factor really necessary…
-
The free certs from https://letsencrypt.org/ do indeed work as described. I wanted to check them out for some public facing services I wanted to run. To get the certificate you run a program on a host that DNS resolves to the cert you want to get – so if “foo.example.com” resolves to 10.6.6.6, you need to install…
-
d3ck, d3ck, goose
A bit over 2 years ago I started on a journey that has become a bit surreal; I had what seemed like a modest goal, simply create something that would facilitate confidential (e.g. encrypted) sharing of information in an easy way. Then snowden came along, and things started become even more… interesting, in the Chinese…
-
certificates and security
npm is the defacto package manager for the node.js javascript network programming environment thingee. The folks who make npm have taken a security leap: npm no longer supports its self-signed certificates Ah, they build the bastions of light and goodness, protecting us from the sins of the masses by standing tall. So… how do you install…
-
Random bits
… well, literally… or pseudo literally? To generate 128 bits of pseudo-randomness: dd if=/dev/urandom bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null| hexdump |awk ‘{$1=""; printf("%s", $0)}’ | sed ‘s/ //g’ Block size 16 = 16 bytes… do that once (count=1); that’s 16 bytes * 8 bits/byte = 128 bits. I’ve been using this in scripts lately, like “foo=$(…)”.