The third part of this series presented PBKDF2 as a modern key derivation and password hashing algorithm. But PBKDF2 has its limitations; for best protection against password cracking the iteration count (defining the computing power needed to hash a password) should be chosen as high as possible. On the other hand, a higher iteration count also means that a login of a […]
The last part of this series presented a fairly serious password hashing algorithm using an HMAC and a salt value. However, as this article will show, this construction can be much improved, dramatically raising the “price” for an attacker to crack a password hash. How to Attack a Password Database To improve our salted HMAC construction, we need to know how an adversary […]
In this third part of how to get a native app feeling with HTML, Javascript and CSS we will build a basic but solid navigation system. This is where we start building our application and influence our know-how from part 1 and part 2. While my colleague at Point Software, François Scheurer, is working on his next article […]
In this blog article I will show the different types of secret sharing methods especially the common used Shamires secret sharing method. Thereafter I will explain the mathematical background of this procedure. What is Secret Sharing about? Let’s start with the following situation. A big heritage should be distributed over 6 heirs. The heritage is […]
Introduction If you are looking for information to use free libraries to convert and resize video files within a Scala or Java project, you may probably have cross the road of an open source project called Xuggle .This library is written in Java but is using native code from ffmpeg (another open source project) for the many video and […]
In the first part of this blog series we have forked Point Software’s Scala Hack Session and cloned a remote repository on a local machine using EGit. In this second part you will learn how to make changes, use branches, commit on your local repository and then pushing it all to your remote project. As you will see below […]
There is a great colleague of mine, François Scheurer, having an enumerous number of notes about everything he has been working and researching on: Linux, Scala, mathematical algorithms, NoSQL, Clustering, Security etc. Recently he and I attended two online courses about Scala’s functional and reactive programming. While attending both courses he and I have discussed, researched, and created […]
The first part of this article presented secure hash algorithms, the basic building blocks for password hashing. This part will now show how to apply these building blocks to construct a reasonable password hashing algorithm. Take it with a Pinch of Salt Since we now know much more about secure hash functions, can we use something like SHA-256 or maybe […]
It covers the main differences between ext3 and ext4 with a focus on filesystem consistency. This article was the initial motivation of this blog series, because many engineers are unaware that the standard option of ext4 (delalloc) is dangerous for their data! 4.1 Main differences Ext3 was available since 2001 with Linux Kernel 2.4.15 and […]