Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: authentication

  • Verification Codes

    One would hope that verification codes would be extremely random. More randomness makes it harder for a malicious entity (person or computer) to guess the code. Less randomness makes it easier. With all the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) out there, we hope there is enough randomness in these methods to make them unguessable by someone attempting to…

  • OpenSSL Handshake

    One of the questions we ask our clients initiating an engagement to help them setup external authentication from our LMS to their server is, “What is the certificate authority for your SSL certificate?” We have been burned by people purchasing certificates from authorities Java does not support. (And the support is indeed limited compared to say,…

  • Email Harvesters

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    I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup. Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed…

  • Preserving CE/Vista Settings

    I’ve been asked for notes about this a few times. So here’s a blog post instead. 🙂 A coworker is working on scripting our updates. We lost the Luminis Message Adapter settings in applying the patch to the environment we provide to our clients. Fortunately, those settings are maintained by us not our clients. So…

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some…

  • Tale of Defeating the Crazy Woman

    Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual. So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring…