Writing
Tagged “security”
21 articles
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OpenPGP and Email: The Hype, the Truth, and the Falsehoods
Encrypted email never became a mainstream habit, and the usual explanation — bad tooling — is wrong. The problems are structural, better UX doesn't fix them, and the privacy win that actually landed needed nobody's…
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Introduction to OpenCTI
OpenCTI is an open source platform for organizing cyber threat intelligence: who's attacking whom, with what, and how to spot them. What threat intelligence actually is, how OpenCTI models it with STIX, how it compares…
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What is Authentik SSO?
Authentik is an open source identity provider you can run yourself: single sign-on over OIDC, SAML and LDAP, MFA, and a proxy that puts a login in front of apps that have none. What it does, how it compares with…
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Who is DARPA?
A small Pentagon agency with no labs of its own funded the beginnings of the internet, Unix's networking, self-driving cars and the voice assistant in your phone. How DARPA works, what it actually built (and what it…
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Challenging the Reign of UNIX and Linux
Every serious operating system in use today is either Unix, Unix-like or Windows, and the core ideas date from the 1970s. Is it time for something new? The projects trying, from Fuchsia and seL4 to Redox and Huawei's…
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CrowdStrike Post-Mortem
Nine days after the outage, CrowdStrike has published a preliminary review. A test that should have caught the bad update passed because the test itself had a bug, and the content went to every machine at once. What the…
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Deep Dive into Zero Trust Security Model
The practical companion to my zero trust primer. The architecture as NIST defines it, what a single request looks like when it's verified end to end, how devices and services prove who they are, and a realistic order to…
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CrowdStrike’s History of Releasing Software That Breaks Operating Systems
Friday's Windows outage wasn't the first time this year a CrowdStrike update took down machines. Linux administrators running Debian and RHEL had already been through it, months earlier and with far less attention. What…
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OPINION: Why Webmin is Bad
Webmin puts a root-privileged web server on port 10000 and edits your configuration files with its own parsers. It has shipped a backdoor, it hides what it changes, and it keeps people from learning the system…
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Open Source Alternatives to Crowdstrike: Ensuring Resilience Against Global Outages
After today's outage, a lot of people are asking whether open source security tools could replace CrowdStrike. Some can do parts of the job, and some do them very well. None of them is a drop-in replacement, and open…
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Understanding the Causes of Widespread Outages: The Cases of CrowdStrike and Microsoft
Written the day it happened. A faulty CrowdStrike update crashed Windows machines worldwide, grounding flights and taking hospitals and banks offline, the morning after a separate Azure outage. It wasn't an attack. Why…
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Understanding the Leading CDNs
A content delivery network makes your site faster and harder to knock over, and puts a third party in the middle of every request. How CDNs work, how Cloudflare, Akamai, CloudFront, Fastly, Imperva and Sucuri differ…