Well, this is a different kind of post. This is for me to thank my readers, as few of you as there may be, just know your numbers are growing! I just got allmybase.com registered for another year, it was kinda cutting it close, though. This also seems to coincide with another event: I just noticed my HTSCR has hit 10:1. HTSCR in my mind means “Hit to Spam Comment Ratio”. I think that’s something I’m gonna try to start. Pass it on. A combination of the kismet and WordPress.com stats plugins keeps the statistics necessary to deduce your HTSCR. So yeah, thank you, reader, for sticking with me through a whole year on this site. I have just reached over 10,000 total visits, which is cool (your numbers are growing!), and 1,000 spam comments, which I guess is kinda cool. I’m up to about 50 hits a day now, too, which is pretty good for mid-semester-lack-of-updates season. I’d love to buy each one of you a beer, but then I’d owe spammers a thousand beers, and I’d probably owe google like 5,000, and I don’t have a lot of money. But, I’ll make a deal, if you 1) Read allmybase.com once in a while at least, 2) Know me a bit in person, and 3) Not send unsolicited email, then I will buy you a beer when you invite me out. Keyword is “muffin tray”.

So thanks again for reading, I appreciate it.

P.S. Seriously, your numbers are growing! Tell people! Go!

P.P.S. Faster!

I have a wonderful habit of binding “open a terminal” in gnome’s System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts dialog to the Windows key. This is the key that in WIndows would typically open up the start menu. However, I wasn’t able to do so after an update to Fedora 12. I would press the key in the shortcuts window, and nothing would happen. I could combine the Windows key with another key, and it recognized the Windows key as mod4, a modifying key like control or alt. I figured out the problem, just run this command to unbind the windows key as a modifier and go back to it just being known as “Super_L”:

xmodmap -e “remove mod4 = Super_L”

Then go back into the Keyboard Shortcuts list and try again. Super_L should now show up in the window when you hit the key.

I wrote this code in a pinch to take a string and “add one” to it. Essentially, this code will take a fixed-length string, and iterate through every possible combination of characters available. For example, if argv[2] is set to 8, it will start with “!!!!!!!!” and go through every combination until it reaches “zzzzzzzz”. The string will also be null-terminated, too. Thought this might be useful to some people out there, and you should know exactly the application for a function like this…

char* tosend = (char*)calloc(atoi(argv[2])+1, sizeof(char));
for(i = 0; i < atoi(argv[2]); i++) { tosend[i] = (char)33; } tosend[i] = '\0'; for(j = atoi(argv[2]); j >= 0; j–)
{
if(*(tosend+((j-1)*sizeof(char))) != ‘z’)
{
*(tosend+((j-1)*sizeof(char))) = *(tosend+((j-1)*sizeof(char))) + 1;
while(*(tosend+((j)*sizeof(char))) != ‘\0’)
{
*(tosend+((j)*sizeof(char))) = ‘!’;
j++;
}
break;
}
}

For my final, my professor asked us to write what we think will be the top three security issues in 2012. I put:

1) DoS Mitigation in Cloud Computing Infrastructures
2) IPv4 to IPv6 transition
3) Mobile and pervasive computing & smartphone security.

I’m interested to hear what others might think will be big issues… If you read this, please leave a comment and let me know what you think. I’d love to compile a list with rationale on why they’ll be issues and put it out for publication. Thanks!

Lately it seems the big buzz around the computing world has moved from “Web 2.0” to “Cloud Computing”. All sorts of services are moving into the cloud: storage, content delivery, and pretty soon Google will even release their Chrome OS, a netbook OS running entirely in the cloud.

What does this mean for the average user? Not too much, they just need internet access. But for the serving body? They need to really lock down their assets, and make sure their services will be highly available. This means in addition to protecting from finesse attacks based on software flaws, extra special attention needs to be paid to mitigating Denial of Service attacks.

I’ve written a paper on why this is so important, available [by clicking right here]. This covers why it’s so important to protect the cloud against denial of service attacks, as well as common types of attacks and how to defend against them. It will bring you though a shallow analysis (with pretty pictures) of DoS attacks, their defences, and even an overview on the Storm botnet and how it operates.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments, especially suggestions for improvements.