My ISP recently gave me a free speed bump from 500Mbps to 1 Gbps. I wanted to test if it was possible to fully utilise the bandwidth on a single file transfer. Firstly, we need to look at the test file size. I settled on a roughly 500MB to 1GB file size to minimise the effect of TCP window size ...

A port can only be bound to one service at a time, which makes perfect sense since the OS cannot possibly know which application to route the packet to. However, protocols often have distinct signatures, for example the first few bytes of SSH is always SSH-2.0 while HTTP packets always start ...

Technical prowess, Legal expertise and Guts. That is what you need to go up against a Nation State Adversary. We shall take the Apple vs US Government debate as an example. Apple obviously has the technical prowess to store the iPhone's PIN code securely. If it were easily retrievable, the ...

Many people have the misconception that biometrics such as fingerprint readers are more secure than passwords. It probably stems from Hollywood spy movies showing Top Secret facilities protected by biometric devices. However, for the vast majority of us who use sensible 8-12 character passwords ...

A number of friends have recently sought my advice on NAS and RAID solutions for storing their personal data. I do not usually give brand recommendations but I will discuss the technology involved. I have never used RAID nor found a need for it, this is because RAID (Redundant Array of ...

Earlier this year, TSA master keys were leaked and ordinary folks were supposedly able to 3D print these keys and open any luggage with a TSA lock. Despite the huge uproar, I personally feel that it is not that big of a deal because Valuables go in hand carry, clothes go in luggage. Few people ...

I have using xenserver as my hypervisor for the past 6 months and have run a number of VMs on it. However, there were some deal breakers which led me to migrate back to running Ubuntu as the base OS and running the VMs in VirtualBox on top of Ubuntu. Lack of USB passthrough support - Can only ...

Yesterday, a CDN was hacked and malicious JS was served to a number of domains. Most websites make use of CDNs to serve up JS so as to reduce page load time. How do we protect ourselves from such attacks? I posed a similar question on Sec.SE some time back. Subresource Integrity is a new ...