Triggered by a provocative announcement for their The Cuckoo in the Tendering Process: When the vendor loses to itself panel discussion by Peer Heinlein ( Heinlein Support ) and Johannes Loxen ( Sernet ) on LinkedIn, I attended the 10th Bitkom Open Source Forum in Erfurt . This free one-day conference on open source in a business context has become a highly informative event - that is well worth attending. This year's motto of The future of open source - fair, regulated, intelligent was exactly what I needed at the moment, and I spent the whole day in the Open Source - regulated track. Cockoo or What Is My Business Model? The panel discussion was about the challenges Peer faces in marketing OpenTalk , the open source videoconferencing software that Heinlein Support has developed over the last few years. Competitors seem to be offering OpenTalk hosting packages in public tenders, even though they don't contribute to the code or fix bugs. In the end, Peer c...
I'm a big fan of test driven development (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode...
SOPS is the de-facto standard for securely storing secrets in Git repositories. It creates encrypted containers that protect the secret content. The containers are in YAML, JSON, ENV or INI format so that the regular Git operations and line-based diffs still work. Also, SOPS only encrypts the values of the secrets so that it is easy to see the purpose of a secret. SOPS files use external "trust anchors" for key material so that the ability to decrypt a SOPS file depends on the access to the appropriate decryption key or service. While SOPS files are considered secure by themselves, the security posture actually depends entirely on protecting these external trust anchors - and on controlling the trust anchors added to a SOPS file . SOPS files are often used with cloud-based key management systems (KMS), which has the great advantage of providing an online identity verification prior to granting access to the encrypted data. A malicious actor — espe...
Comments
Post a Comment