Blog / Security

Extra secure, automated, offsite backup with TrueCrypt and Dropbox

August 3, 2011

I love Dropbox, it really does simplify my life.

If you’ve never used Dropbox before, you should definitely check it out as it’s a very painless way to synchronize files from multiple computers and supports all major operating systems, including mobile platforms (it’s free for up to 2GB). Your data is stored offsite so if someone breaks in to your home, steals your computer and that external hard drive lying next to it where …

How to use client certificate authentication with Suds

July 15, 2011

This is related to my last post. I was finally able to communicate to an SSL-enabled SOAP service with my computer behind a proxy but then ran into another problem: certificate-based authentication.

Suds actually doesn’t support certificate authentication directly, but fortunately someone created a custom transport for it here.

I tried his code but then ran into connection issues again, I had to modify it a little bit to include the proxy settings …

Cracking passwords using the power of your GPU

July 12, 2011

I read this article a few weeks ago and I just had to try it. The use of GPUs in high performance computing is becoming very popular nowadays because you get so much computing power at very little cost compared to CPUs. You can pretty much buy a workstation and put 8 NVIDIA Tesla GPU cards in it and you got yourself a nice little supercomputer that can compete with a big CPU cluster or …

How to set the proxy settings in Windows via command line

June 11, 2011

Once in a while I need to download and install Python packages at work and having switched to Linux (Ubuntu) at home, I find it quite annoying now to have to go to a website, download the package I need, then manually install.

Fortunately, the pip installer works for Windows as well, allowing the installation of Python packages automatically with a simple command (pip install package_name). But at work, we’re behind a proxy …

How to convert a Java keystore (JKS) to PEM format

May 8, 2011

I’m currently working on a new project where I need to write a service to serve static files to users. Our web application currently runs on Tomcat alone as we don’t have many users (internal users only) and most of the content is dynamic. But with this new project it just seems to make sense to put an Apache web server in front of Tomcat and use the mod_xsendfile module to serve the files, which …