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I have completed the Open University course 'Introduction to Cyber Security'. Topics included threat landscape, authentication, malware, networking and communications security, cryptography, legal background, recovering from attacks and risk analysis & management.
I had some knowledge of this subject from work and education but it was nice to study this as a cohesive unit. There was an interesting mix of content including video, images, audio and text. The case studies, particularly those regarding how cyber criminals conducted their attacks, were fascinating.
I wanted to do the weekly tests for the course, so opted to pay for an upgrade to have the tests included. I got an overall mark of over 70% for the tests which meant I successfully passed the course.
posted at: 00:00 | path: /cryptography | permanent link to this entry
I needed to encrypt a directory on laptop quickly & with the minimum of fuss. So rather than re-partition drives etc (necessary for some encryption types) I used ecryptfs, which is relatively quick & straight forward to set up.
root@sal:~# apt-get install ecryptfs-utils root@sal:~# modprobe ecryptfs jamespk@sal:~$ ecryptfs-setup-private Enter your login passphrase [jamespk]: #login password Enter your mount passphrase [leave blank to generate one]: ************************************************************************ YOU SHOULD RECORD YOUR MOUNT PASSPHRASE AND STORE IT IN A SAFE LOCATION. ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase ~/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase THIS WILL BE REQUIRED IF YOU NEED TO RECOVER YOUR DATA AT A LATER TIME. ************************************************************************ Logout, and log back in to begin using your encrypted directory.
All fairly straight forward, *but* I came across this warning: here https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=590081 It seems that when Debian installs ecryptfs, it does not add it to /etc/modules, which is important as that link suggests that you might well get locked out of your desktop. So make sure you add a line for `ecryptfs` in /etc/modules.
posted at: 00:00 | path: /cryptography | permanent link to this entry
I recently encrypted a portable hard drive (a Verbatium "Store'n'Go" 500GB) for backups. I decided to use LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format), to encrypt an entire partition.
I found a couple of good references to Encrypt hard drives: Encrypting-your-usb-pen-drive-with-luks and Encrypting-USB-Sticks.
I created two partitions but only encrypted one of them.
NB The real device names have been modified (in case a copy & paste results has unexpected consequences).
Here are the steps I followed on Debian Wheezy.Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/xyz1 2048 411043839 205520896 83 Linux /dev/xyz2 411043840 976773167 282864664 83 Linux
root@sal:~# mkfs -t ext3 -L verbatim_0a -v /dev/xyz1
root@sal:~# cryptsetup -yvh sha256 -c aes-xts-plain -s 256 luksFormat /dev/xyz2
root@hal:~# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/xyz2 verbatim_1b #note last argument is not a path Enter passphrase for /dev/xyz2:
root@sal:~# mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/verbatim_1b
root@hal:~# mount /dev/mapper/verbatim_1b /media/verbatim_1b
root@hal:~# umount /media/verbatim_1b root@hal:~# cryptsetup luksClose verbatim_1b
root@hal:~# cryptsetup -v status verbatim_1bSee also;
man cryptsetup
posted at: 00:00 | path: /cryptography | permanent link to this entry