Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

I'm by no means an absolute source for security wisdom, but after working in a handful of different environments, I've learned about using Password Managers in an IT environment. I generally recommend Keepass, but I'd like to expound on that recommendation a bit.

If you hate math, you're gonna have a bad time: I'll let you know that right now. You might not have noticed but you've used RSA encryption before. It gets it's name from the MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman who invented the algorithm. Let's take a look at how RSA encryption works.

You may not realize it but you've very likely used LDAP. If you've signed onto a computer at a business or a school/college campus within the last 30 years then you almost definitely have. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It's an open standard being supported by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. I've already described DNS as akin to a phonebook for the internet. However, LDAP is like a company-wide phonebook. LDAP is the protocol for a special database that's been designed to store attributes about users, services, etc.

SELinux stands for Security Enhanced Linux and was developed, in part, by the NSA. Eventually, SELinux was released under open-source license and has made it's way into a number of Linux distributions.

You know how after you've signed on to your workstation, you can open up your Outlook or Lync without having to sign into them? Or, you can pull up your company's intranet without having to sign your username and password again? That's something called single-sign-on (SSO) and it's made possible by Kerberos. Kerberos is a security protocol for authentication. According to Greek mythology, Kerberos was the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades.

I touched on SSH configuration in my post about performing the initial configuration on my CentOS Pi . Aside from one tweak to the config file, there wasn't a lot to do. In this post, I'm going to dive a bit deeper into how SSH Keys work, how to set it up in your environment, and then I'll dive a bit deeper into locking down the SSH configuration.