Tag: security

  • Why I deactivated Tesla app access

    The official Tesla App is unfortunately not available for Ubuntu Phone. And there is no indication that it will be on my next phone, the Librem5 from Purism. On the bright side, from the computer I can control my car using the VisibleTesla desktop app running inside a docker container. But the best part about […]

  • Verifying downloads

    Last week I stumbled across a post from last year, where somebody described how it was impossible to download an important infrastructure program securely on Windows. My first reaction was of course to pity the poor souls that are still stuck with Windows. How easy is it to just type apt-get install and have all […]

  • connecting home securely

    It has been probably close to a decade that I run a small server at home. At first it was only because I could not find a web hosting company that would serve my fcgi libwt apps at an affordable price. Then I added this blog to it. In the meantime I added a lot […]

  • fido universal 2nd factor authentication

    In the time since my rant about passwords, more and more sites adopt OAuth. I don’t like this development. Usually they offer login with facebook, sometimes with google or twitter and rarely with linkedin. The problem with OAuth is that the site operator decides what providers are supported. With OpenID on the other hand, I […]

  • We have been using passwords for too long

    Every time I have to register to a website using a password, I grow more annoyed. Passwords were fine when you only had one, to log in to your corporate mainframe. But these days, computers are better at cracking passwords than humans at remembering them. It only gets worse with the more sites you maintain […]

  • locally encrypted remote storage

    Unlike the ordinary users, tech savy people are well aware of what can happen to your data, if you store it on cloud services such as dropbox. There are services that promise to encrypt your data locally, so that they can’t access them, a prominent one being wuala. On one hand, I don’t know if […]

  • Full disk encryption with the crypto stick

    Last week I finished the udacity applied cryptography course. I did not as well as in the other courses, nonetheless I learned a lot and it was (as always) really interesting. We learned about symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashes as well as key exchange and management. Each week in addition to the regular homework, we […]

  • Playing with Smart-Cards

    Ever since reading the book “Kryptographie und IT-Sicherheit” where I first learned about how SmartCards work, I wanted to do some SmartCard programming. In the book it describes some inner workings of Smart Cards, and that some of them have a small Java VM inside. But it turned out that the entry was not as […]