Tag: Networking

Blog posts filed under this tag.

Assigning IP addresses to a geographical location

2008-12-23 Programming Geoip Networking Oss Php Security

Knowing roughly where a visitor is connecting from is genuinely useful: you can send them to the shop of their own country, show events happening near them, or keep whole regions away from your SSH daemon. It is not, however, something to build a security control on. Visitors behind a proxy in another country, behind a corporate VPN, or coming out of a Tor exit node will be placed wherever their exit point is, and mobile carriers routinely hand out addresses that geolocate hundreds of kilometres from the actual device.

SignServer: a Java framework for centralised cryptographic operations

2008-06-23 Applications Java Networking Oss Security

SignServer is an application framework written in Java that performs cryptographic operations on behalf of other applications. Instead of teaching every application in your organisation how to talk to a hardware security module, you run one signing service and let the others call it. That is useful in two situations in particular: when the keys have to live in hardware that the existing enterprise applications cannot be connected to, and when the operations are sensitive enough that you want them managed and audited in exactly one place.