George Georgovassilis writes about information technology architecture
This post was extensively discussed on Hacker News.Alex Buznik, nas.net.ua kindly provided a two-part Russian translation: part1 and part2. This post discusses hardware considerations, installing Linux, setting up software RAID, robustness and dealing with data corruption. I've been running for a decade a self-built NAS at home, so I thought I'd write down my experience … Continue reading Building the perfect, cheap DIY NAS
Context: as a tenant administrator you can't inspect KeyVault contents created by other people ("you are unauthorized to view these contents"). Solution: assign yourself appropriate permissions like this: Locate the KeyVault in the Azure portal: go to "Access policies"click "+Add Access Policy"Key permissions: everything under "Key Management Operations" and "Cryptographic Operations"Accordingly for key and certificate … Continue reading Azure diaries: can’t access KeyVault
Slides for a scalable, robust OIDC identity provider with an extensible architecture.
I obtained permission to publish my presentation for an internal gig of a security enterprise architecture. When setting up a security architecture in the enterprise context topics like business continuity, people and processes, governance, services and technology are relevant. https://www.slideshare.net/GeorgeGeorgovassilis/security-architecture-127061728
TL;DR: Recovering data from a password-protected SATA hard disk that was locked by a Thinkpad I wish this post would be as generally valid as the title suggests; at this hour I'm just unspeakably glad to have unlocked a hard disk I didn't even know I had locked and can finally go to bed. What … Continue reading Unlocking a password-protected hard disk
By observing news and public discussions I feel that there is a growing awareness of data privacy and an increasing demand for secure person-to-person communication. In order to address my communication needs, I plugged together a few Javascript libraries and started the Webencryption [1] project on Github. What is Webencryption? Webencryption is a rather crude … Continue reading Secure messaging in the browser
Homomorphic cryptography [1], should it ever become available as a product, will have an intriguing property: computers will be able to operate on encrypted data without either having to- or being able to decrypt it. Competitive or regulatory pressure leads many organisations to distrust public (or private) clouds with their data and algorithms, so they … Continue reading RSA is partially cryptographically homomorphic
(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across - so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I'll keep updating. The post title includes "advanced" because the topics discussed here involve clever, non-trivial hacks, are novel at the time of their publication … Continue reading Advanced web security topics
In this post I talk about setting up and securely operating development tools like Jenkins and Gitlab on a server connected to the internet. All applications run behind a firewall and a reverse HTTP proxy which allows only HTTP requests from selected users through who authenticate themselves with client certificates. Putting web-facing software on the … Continue reading Securing a development server
I started quite a while ago moving a pet project to ip6. While it doesn't involve any programming per se, it turned out to be quite a complicated process involving multiple configuration steps. Thus, for your enjoyment I present: running a website on ip6 with Ubuntu 14.04 (older versions won't work because their kernel doesn't … Continue reading Running a website on ip6
