What is Crossplane? Crossplane is a tool that allows you to use Kubernetes to build and maintain infrastructure. The intent is to serve as a centralized cross-platform control plane for your infrastructure. (You can do a lot more than build infrastructure, and there is a famous example of using it to order pizza to proveContinue reading “Learning Crossplane: Creating a GKE Cluster from Scratch (Crossplane 1.1)”
Author Archives: paul
Raspberry Pi as a Splunk Universal Forwarder to Store-and-Foward Logs
I am a fan of Splunk, so I run it at home. The problem is, I don’t want it running all the time, but I always want to collect logs. Why don’t I just leave Splunk running? I run it as a virtual machine and it consumes memory and cpu, which I often need for otherContinue reading “Raspberry Pi as a Splunk Universal Forwarder to Store-and-Foward Logs”
Book Review: Lauren Ipsum
I don’t normally post book reviews, but I am so impressed with Lauren Ipsum that I feel compelled to plug it. It is a great book for young readers – and the rest of us too! Most importantly, it is a fun book. My 7-year old daughter and I are reading it together, and sheContinue reading “Book Review: Lauren Ipsum”
Application Configuration Management
For many years now, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of configuration management maturity in the applications I use. I’m particularly surprised (appalled) that security software nearly always falls short. The problem isn’t only with security software, it’s just that I would expect more from software designed to secure systems. Virtually all security software maintainsContinue reading “Application Configuration Management”
Part 6 – Addendum
This is an addendum to a five part series: Introduction Encryption and Hashes Simple Hashes and Collisions Reduction Functions Rainbow Tables and Chains Addendum I’ll update this more later (or just replace it), but wanted to comment on the fact that there is an important difference between my sample rainbow tables and those in theContinue reading “Part 6 – Addendum”
Rainbow Tables – Part 5 (Chains and Rainbow Tables)
This is Part 5 of a five part series: Introduction Encryption and Hashes Simple Hashes and Collisions Reduction Functions Rainbow Tables and Chains (you are here) Addendum So – here we go! Let’s look at rainbow tables! Here is a sample lookup table for a very simplistic encryption algorithm (discussed in Part 2) that takesContinue reading “Rainbow Tables – Part 5 (Chains and Rainbow Tables)”
Rainbow Tables – Part 4 (Reduction Functions)
This is Part 4 of a five part series: Introduction Encryption and Hashes Simple Hashes and Collisions Reduction Functions (you are here) Rainbow Tables and Chains Addendum Reduction functions are at the heart of how rainbow tables work. To understand reduction functions, lets look at a set of two-digit values that are “encrypted” into four-digitContinue reading “Rainbow Tables – Part 4 (Reduction Functions)”
Rainbow Tables – Part 3 (Simple Hashes and Collisions)
This is Part 3 of a five part series: Introduction Encryption and Hashes Simple Hashes and Collisions (you are here) Reduction Functions Rainbow Tables and Chains Addendum Geoff Kuenning, a computer science professor at Harvey Mudd College, has a great web page about hashes as a part of one of his classes. Let’s look atContinue reading “Rainbow Tables – Part 3 (Simple Hashes and Collisions)”
Rainbow Tables – Part 2 (Encryption and Hashes)
This is Part 2 of a five part series: Introduction Encryption and Hashes (you are here) Simple Hashes and Collisions Reduction Functions Rainbow Tables and Chains Addendum As I mentioned in the first post of this series, rainbow tables are used to find a password if you know the encrypted password. Passwords typically are (orContinue reading “Rainbow Tables – Part 2 (Encryption and Hashes)”
Rainbow Tables – Part 1 (Introduction)
This is Part 1 of a five part series: Introduction (you are here) Encryption and Hashes Simple Hashes and Collisions Reduction Functions Rainbow Tables and Chains Addendum In January, I took the SANS Security Essentials (401) class at SANS West. In the class, we briefly covered the concept of rainbow tables. Rainbow tables are (superficially)Continue reading “Rainbow Tables – Part 1 (Introduction)”
A Stich in Time 