Collaborate Disseminate
I’m learning that much of the security advice I come across under the “hardening” heading simply does not apply to a single-user home desktop box sitting in a private wireless IPv4 LAN behind a Comcast cable modem. Furthermo… Continue reading What’s there to harden for a home Unix-box behind Comcast cable modem?
BREACH, a new attack on SSL that targets HTTP compression, has recently been publicly announced.
I manage a few web servers. How can I audit them to check which of them are potentially vulnerable to BREACH? Is there a simple way to scan… Continue reading How to audit web servers for resistance/vulnerability to BREACH
I recently acquired a netbook to play with, and I want to install Kali Linux so I can start learning about network security and exploit development. I want to use this to learn as much about security as I can.
What is the best way to par… Continue reading Most secure way to partition linux?
I was reading about return-to-libc attacks at Wikipedia.
According to what I read and understood from the article, ASCII armoring means that binary data is converted into ASCII values by grouping them into 8-bit chunks.
Th… Continue reading How does ASCII-Armoring help to prevent buffer-overflow attacks?
There’s been a lot of buzz around this recent CNN article about Shodan, a search engine that can find and allow access to unsecured internet-connected devices.
Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devic… Continue reading How can I protect my internet-connected devices from discovery by Shodan?
I’ve asked a few questions relating to schemes for various security-related functions, and posited schemes to accomplish those goals. In the responses, I see a conflict between two fundamental principles of IT security; “defense in depth” … Continue reading Defense in depth vs low complexity – Balancing point?
In terms of a home network, is there any reason to set up a router firewall so that all outgoing ports are blocked, and then open specific ports for things such as HTTP, HTTPS, etc. Given that every computer on the network is trusted, sure… Continue reading Why block outgoing network traffic with a firewall?
How do you improve the security of your ssh session against a man-in-the-middle attack?
Continue reading How to correctly secure a ssh session against MITM attack?
I’ve been reading in most hardening guides for Linux, that you should check for files and directories without valid user or valid group. What I can’t find, is how this could be used for an attack, or how this could be a weakn… Continue reading Why should the user ID and group ID of every file match an existing user?
It has been suggested in securing PHP article that using directive as below in htaccess is more secure than hardcoding it into your app:
<VirtualHost ilia.ws>
Include /home/ilia/sql.cnf
</VirtualHost>
then declare your par… Continue reading Is it a secure way to declare DB parameters in htaccess rather than in a PHP file?