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

Running a website on ip6

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

Reddit as an OAuth provider for a Java backend

OAuth (2) and Java work well together, there are plenty of libraries available which handle the general case and the more specific peculiarities of the various OAuth providers. Despite solid implementations like my favourite Spring Social [1] framework  the state of OAuth is at best fragmented. Not only because Spring Social is not as well … Continue reading Reddit as an OAuth provider for a Java backend

Non-Latin characters, openID and the openid4java library

The openid4java [1] library is a very handy set of components that handles openid and oauth for java applications and definitely worth a look before you capitulate in frustration before all that modern openid stuff. For those of us living and working outside the 7bit-speaking ANSI niche there is one webserver setting to verify: the … Continue reading Non-Latin characters, openID and the openid4java library