Open Source: The Naive "Good Ol' Days" are Gone

It used to be that open source was generally trusted because it was assumed peer-review would catch stuff like this. Welcome to the World of Today; not any more!  

Sometimes the way forward is backwards...

A thought-provoking article from System Engineer Paul Czarkowski on why VMs may be poised to make a come-back in 2019 😲

RSA says "No!" to NSA fingered random bit generator

Uh... yeah! Way to go RSA :-)

Using openssl to encrypt/decrypt text

Here's a simple example of using the Linux openssl command to encrypt typed text data into a file and then extract it back from the file afterwards. We'll use the AES-128 encryption algorithm for this example and ask openssl to base64 encode the encrypted data afterwards, so it can be happily stored in a text file.

First, let's encrypt a test string into the file /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt:

$ openssl enc -aes128 -a -out /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
Verifying - enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Note: To terminate the input type a couple of Ctrl-D characters.

Now, let's read the encrypted text from /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt and display the original string back:

$ openssl enc -d -a -aes128 -in /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc decryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Cool, huh?