Ed's Big Plans

Brief: This is a technical briefing I made for fellow students in a Computer Security class (Winter 2011) about Secure Socket Layer [SSL] (now Transport Layer Security [TLS]). These briefings fit in nicely since it came after Dr. Obimbo explained the number theory behind RSA (modulus prime exponentiation). I went to the primary source on this topic to write this document: thanks to the Internet Engineering Task Force. I’ve posted this document as a consumable reference for anyone who needs it.

>>> Download: A Network Security Spotlight on SSL/TLS and HTTPS (pdf) <<<

Figure $_: A Schematic of the SSL/TLS Handshaking Procedure.

This document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. The enclosed figures are further released into the public domain.

I finally found a solution for the port forwarding issue I was having with Sun VirtualBox (i.e. NAT provided a weird one-way mapping from which Tin (host) couldn’t dial into TinUbuntu (guest)…) — as far as I understand, this solution is guest operating system neutral but must be configured for each guest handled by a particular installation of Sun VirtualBox. That means that if you’re crazy like me and plan to put your virtual harddrives on USB sticks, you’d probably do just as well to put in a makefile that will do your configurations for you too. So here’s the solution, also saved in my wiki for extra truthiness!

Thanks to Evan and his “justwerks software” blog.

The following commands were issued…

cd /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS

$VBoxManage setextradata "TinUbuntu"\
     "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/Protocol" TCP

$VBoxManage setextradata "TinUbuntu"\
     "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/GuestPort" 22

$VBoxManage setextradata "TinUbuntu"\
     "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/HostPort" 2222

Which causes TinUbuntu TCP:22 to be forwarded to Tin TCP:2222.

In future, I should remove these rules and re-add them replacing “guesthttp” with my own name for this rule– In his blog, Evan has used a series of names: “guesthttp”, “guestssh” and “guestsql”– In reality, these are actually very good, unambiguous names that I’ll probably end up borrowing.

The one thing I should really dig around for is the meaning of “LUN#0”– it looks like something that’s important– the remaining virtual-directory-like objects in the configuration string look less daunting– “pcnet/0” is likely referring to the first virtual network adaptor connected to TinUbuntu.

A Monet Isopentenol c/o Autotrace

Brief: Happy accidents make me happy– here’s isopentenol after grabbing it as an SDF out of PubChem, dumping it out into a PNG with Bioclipse, grayscaling it with GIMP— then converting it to an SVG with Autotrace (RO IT Systems)… It’s just pretty… like a Monet. Of course, I have to go back and make it look like a molecule again for a paper… but I’m going to admire the pretty little alcohol for a bit.