Unlocking a password-protected hard disk

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 →

Secure messaging in the browser

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 →

RSA is partially cryptographically homomorphic

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 →

Advanced web security topics

(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 →

Securing a development server

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 →