Category: Security
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Simple Notes on RSA encryption with Python’s Cryptography module
I might as well publish my notes. First, about RSA: You need three numbers and calculate the rest. p and q must be (large) primes. They need to be secret. e needs to be chosen so that a certain function (that indirectly depends on p and q) evaluates to 1. e becomes public. You calculate…
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Implementing a device white list with dnsmasq
I got teenagers. They have devices. Their friends have devices. All of which want to be on my WiFi. Unfortunately, the WiFi has some valuable work-related machines, too. And because of WPA shared passwords, there’s little one can do as a parent to prevent the sharing of WiFi passwords “just with my best friend” (of…
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Giving up on nftables
Supposedly, nftables is the successor to iptables. So when implementing a firewall for UBOS, the logical thing to do is to use the new thing instead of the clumsier old thing. But I give up. I cannot figure out how this thing works. All the how-to pages that I found essentially have the same examples,…
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We need open-source firmware
Kapersky reports that hackers in the “Equation Group” (see Ars Technica coverage) infiltrated the firmware of most major hard drive manufacturers: rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers … on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived…
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Google, Mail and PGP — but what about the keys?
Techcrunch reports that Google will release a plugin for the Chrome browser that makes PGP-based encryption much easier for webmail users, such as Gmail users. That’s cool! Mozilla, I hope you are right behind! But the article leaves out the most important question: who will have access to the keys? Chances are that Google will…