Rather than storing your IMAP and SMTP passwords in plain text on disk, you can store them encrypted using GnuPG, OpenSSL, the GNOME Keyring, or any other method of password storage encryption. It still requires a “master password” from you to decrypt the file(s) on the fly, and set the appropriate passwords, but then it [...]
I don’t expect you to follow this post completely, but it’s so amazingly cool, I have to blog it. Consider the hashed sections of ~/.ssh/known_hosts file for (recent) OpenSSH clients, not including the public key parts: |1|kFJT5z0x3ndyutgZ4E5pRk+ORBA=|hzXvdYUudo+qK9BGlFWtSAUXlXc= |1|8wo1+FO0hkATPgQZoeNHeIlvAjw=|dt/a9jz9CnLKP72j+Jr8MKMjgEE= |1|pvBQEKEGLnH0RCJr+8Dmqqnvlrs=|fJJvjyG/TmHFnuIX57nDThq/C4M= |1|HKV4DzgDkajXoUHf9B82JBu7J10=|c/K+MdJvWaZeJFs/W7iqhqo0wvE= |1|rtvQhRVnNanQZYkLUMbjoBGNhn0=|0U6a1LUQqLL6P1T2Wji3VWw69pw= |1|0ziSYi4c+xBXGEBZcNN1LMhYUc4=|qRSN5GSPyQi+fmaVz2zNwkmKoy8= |1|6nv6Vpk3AYgICHxJGVgVdsYRuq0=|fBNOIz1l3RW+N61jyDPunKX9n7E= |1|+b4uA+Mq7RHRAFW21qv8aO3rIRs=|1eizMri01IxEKrXquBnwTYP61Ow= |1|BkB0PZu2qtsLID/Ibe/D68gANQU=|qW6uAzcpecOOKNI4zEvngyfpGkI= |1|n+QrRn7QXeAJ5hRe2M8v8IspihE=|EqUxXdSeIF1cl1fQjl5zILebkGY= |1|BOKuKnWojy028tJf9Y671lws0d0=|SuBQJmJZp5JNVYG/rP9yb9ZhJcE= |1|WACsxtodOiM89kf4rNPLgF1CXZ4=|UTccVeLDZJF3wlH8V05XJNlsOBw= |1|o6FFoirXYblM7wBMdeJDYGMPI58=|5jJB7T7itY702ZHHByXtSpGk9SE= The column fields are similar to [...]
I have been familiar with steganography for a number of years. In fact, back when I was in middle school, I developed a fascination for encryption, and hiding messages, mostly so I could pass notes back and forth to classmates during class. It wasn’t long before I found “invisible ink”, which is a form of [...]
From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/greater-choice-for-wireless-access.html: We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you’d need to [...]
I’m a fan of all things microblogging, but let’s face it: until URLs become part of the XML, and not part of your character count (which is ridiculous anyway), shortened URLs are going to be a way of life. Unfortunately, those shortened URLs can be problematic. They could host malicious scripts and/or software that could [...]
I’m going to try to keep this post short (many of my regular readers will know how long winded I can be). However, with my recent post of setting up Mutt to support both PGP/MIME and S/MIME, based on the account I’m using, I figure a followup post on their similarities and differences might be [...]
This post comes from Matt Taggart, who put together a document about the best practices for using OpenSSH. A lot of the points brought up in that document rang the bells of common sense, and are so good, it’s worth blogging about in hopes that the points mentioned therein reach as many as possible. I’ve [...]
When I was a kid, I had this fascination with cryptography. I learned and used, as most kids to, the Caesar cipher first (using my trusty Captain Crunch Decoder Ring), then later learned and used the Affine cipher. It was great for passing notes in class when I was in elementary and secondary education. I [...]
Just five days ago, I blogged about minting Hashcash tokens in Mutt using a Python script (make sure you check that page for any updates to the source if you’re using it). Well today, I finished writing my verification script. It takes some additional changes to your ~/.muttrc, which I’ll outline here, and it requires [...]
Introduction I wanted to used Hashcash with Mutt, for nothing more than a curiosity to see if it generates any discussion, and to see if people notice. Further, I’m a big crypto advocate, and while Hashcash isn’t exactly crypto, it’s highly related to it, and uses it. Regardless, I wanted to see if I could [...]
I’ve been tasked at work with shredding drives. Not physically, mind you, but digitally. Usually, I grab a copy of the latest version of Knoppix, boot up, pull up a terminal, and grab GNU Shred. Something like: shred -n 3 -v /dev/sda It works well enough. However, it doesn’t display a real useful progress meter, [...]
I’m actually surprised that I haven’t blogged about this before, seeing as though I use it daily. Further, seeing as though I seem to be on a security blogging trip, it only seems fitting to discuss OTR support in Bitlbee now. OTR, or Off-The-Record messaging is the ability to have encrypted and authenticated communication with [...]
I just finished reading an article on Ars Technica titled “Ask Ars: Where should I store my passwords?“. There was a specific paragraph that I took issue with, which in turn prompted me to write this post. It is: “Still, it would take thousands of years to crack an 8-character password when checking both small [...]
So today, I received an email from one of the readers of this blog. He wanted to get into OpenPGP with his email, and asked if I could help him get started with some tutorials, how-tos, etc. I was flattered that he valued my opinion. So, I responded to each of his questions and discussion [...]
I just created a PGP/GPG key signing policy. I’ve never set one before, so there it is. The motivation is three-fold: I want raise awareness for encrypted email, I want to expand the Web of Trust and I want to sign keys. I believe we’ve gotten too anal retentive about the rituals of signing each [...]
