Jamie Scaife - United Kingdom 🇬🇧 

Understanding PGP/GPG Key Server Output

Saturday 26th October 2019

I was recently investigating a suspicious GPG key for one of my domains that had shown some activity on the key servers after been dormant for nearly 10 years. The key wasn't mine, and since anybody can create a key with any name and email address, this wasn't indicative of a breach or imposter. However, it was intriguing to see what this automated system, spammer, or whoever they may be, was trying to do with the key.

PGP/GPG key server output can sometimes be quite confusing, especially if a key has multiple subkeys, user IDs and signatures. This prompted me to create a reference guide for PGP/GPG key server output, to help anyone else who may be in a similar situation. Continue reading...

Security

Deploying a Tor Onion v3 Hidden Service Using Ansible

Monday 16th September 2019

As part of an ongoing project to implement version control and configuration management for all aspects of my infrastructure, I have recently moved the hosting for my Tor Hidden Services onto my main web infrastructure, rather than using a separate dedicated machine. Both of my web servers are set up and managed entirely using Ansible, so I had to put together a new Ansible playbook to install and configure Tor. I've documented it here if anyone else may find it useful.

The configuration described in this article is intended for use on Debian/Ubuntu-based systems, however with minor modifications it should be usable on other systems as well. Continue reading...

Security

Serving security.txt Using a Cloudflare Worker

Wednesday 31st July 2019

One of the most common implementation challenges of security.txt is Content Management Systems or managed hosting providers that don't allow you to set the file correctly. For example, they may disallow writing to the /.well-known directory, or it may not be possible to serve files as the text/plain MIME type.

If this is the case, and you also happen to be fronting your website using Cloudflare, you can use Cloudflare Serverless Workers to serve the file directly from Cloudflare, instead of passing the request through to your origin server/hosting provider.

Serverless, also known as functions-as-a-service (FaaS), allow you to run your code in the cloud, without having to rent individual virtual machines or use traditional shared hosting. Instead, your code runs in short lived and isolated sandboxes on a machine with potentially hundreds of other customers' sandboxed code. Deployment, scaling, resilience and system security is all managed by the serverless provider. You are generally billed per execution or for the amount of CPU time used, making serverless much more cost efficient than other cloud computing models in many cases. Continue reading...

Security

Automating the Integrity Verification Process for Downloaded Software

Wednesday 19th June 2019

I've developed a Bash script that can automatically download and perform integrity verifications for various pieces of software, including Ubuntu ISOs, Kali Linux and some Windows software.

The reason for creating this is to make it significantly easier, more reliable and faster to acquire integrity-checked versions of the software that I regularly use. Previously, downloading and updating this software was a manual process, which is naturally slow and unnecessarily prone to human error.

I've released the script under the MIT license, and it's available on my GitLab profile: https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/dl-integrity-verify Continue reading...

Security