Tag Archives: security

Keeping Your Server Secure With Unattended Upgrades

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Matthias

When operating servers, you’re responsible for keeping them up to date with the latest security fixes. Ubuntu comes with a mechanism that installs updates automatically so you don’t have to worry about it. Obviously, this is meant for personal servers … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Setting Up a SOCKS Proxy Using OpenSSH

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Matthias

Web browsing on a public Wifi network is a security risk as it’s quite simple to capture network traffic. Even if you only connect to SSL-protected sites, people can still find out which web sites you’re accessing. Fortunately, there is … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Getting Started With Kerberos

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Matthias

Recently, I have been playing with Kerberos, a popular Single Sign On system (SSO) that is used in many large organizations. My first contact with Kerberos has been at university in a network security course, but that only covered the … Continue reading →

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OpenID Delegation

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Matthias

OpenID is a great concept but what I don’t like is that I tie myself to a specific identity provider. Suppose the provider goes out of business or doesn’t support OpenID anymore. Of course, I could set up my own … Continue reading →

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Excluding Pages From Authentication

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Matthias

Java’s Servlet spec allows web applications to delegate authentication and authorization to the servlet container, a mechanism known as container-based security. A lot of people use it for in-house applications or web services because it’s simple and containers like Tomcat … Continue reading →

Posted in java | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments

SSH Public Key Authentication

Posted on January 1, 2008 by Matthias

A lot of people use SSH to log into remote hosts. SSH is secure and works well, but if you have to access many hosts with long, well-chosen passwords there is a lot of typing to do just for authentication. … Continue reading →

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Transparent Directory Encryption

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Matthias

In a previous article, I discussed sshfs, a user mode filesystem based on FUSE for accessing remote files. Another useful filesystem type is encfs which provides transparent encryption of directories. With encfs, files are stored encrypted in a special directory … Continue reading →

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Mounting Directories via SSH

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Matthias

For mounting directories from a remote machine, usually NFS or SMB/CIFS is used which requires a running file server. On many linux servers, however, all you have is a shell account, so file transfer has to be done via scp. … Continue reading →

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