The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

schneier-clarifies-his-stance-on-two-factor

Posted by: admin 16 years, 1 month ago

Bruce Schneier posted a clarification on his stance regarding two-factor authentication today.

securing-webdav-with-ssl-and-two-factor

Posted by: admin 16 years, 1 month ago

One reason for the lack of posts recently has been that I have written a how-to on securing WebDAV with SSL and two-factor authentication. Dealing with WebDAV was more of a pain than I anticipated. First, there seems to be a bug in recent versions of apache that breaks mod_auth_radius and mod_auth_xradis. Second, I spent a lot of time figuring out the ways that WebDAV does not work on Windows ;).

squid-and-wikid

Posted by: admin 16 years, 1 month ago

My how-tos on configuring Squid and Freeradius for two-factor authentication are up at Howtoforge.

sha1-broken

Posted by: admin 16 years, 1 month ago

According to a number of places, but primarily Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 has been broken by a team of researchers in China. It's not time to panic if you're using it, but it is time to start thinking about a replacement.

selection-bias-and-information-security

Posted by: admin 16 years, 1 month ago

I read an interesting post about risk strategies and selection bias that made me think about some short term thinking often seen when investments in information security are deferred. Patri Friedman discusses poker strategies in light of selection bias:

You see that if you look at the performance of many businesses w.r.t. a risky practice that is a bad gamble, you can find the slightly negative trend line. But what happens if you consider only those businesses still around? This happens accidentally all the time - after all, its much easier to survey those businesses. The result is that you eliminate the worst failures of the practice you are examining, leaving a falsely positive impression.

The same thing happens in the poker tournament world. Certain styles of play trade EV for variance, allowing people to build up huge stacks occasionally, but usually go bust. Such players often win tournaments - but that doesn’t mean they are playing right. How many times do they fail for each victory? Do they fail more often compared to the money they win than a more conservative player? Some of these “maniacs” are smart players, carefully choosing their gambles and maximizing their returns. But some of them, frankly, are just maniacs, gambling and getting lucky, and giving the false impression that high-variance play is the way to go, because we don’t notice the hundreds of people playing that way and losing.

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