Tag: security

Who would benefit from a TrueCrypt API?

On my drive back from the client to my hotel, I was thinking. Wouldn’t it be cool if Seafile could synchronize to encrypted containers? From there I started thinking about what would be required to pull this off. Firstly, you would have to extend Seafile to support an attribute that lets Seafile know if the storage location was available or not, and then you would have to have something that could manage the encrypted container.

This led me to another idea: giving TrueCrypt an API. At the moment, version 7.1A, it does not provide an API to do so. However, it does provide an interface (GUI for Windows, and CLI+GUI for Linux) and a system level driver. If we were able to extend TrueCrypt to accept commands via an API just consider the possibilities:

  1. Other applications would be able to securely store your files
  2. Seafilecould download and synchronize to a secure location
  3. Shell extensions could be written for file managers to package folders into TrueCrypt encrypted files.

Ok, that isn’t as impressive of a list as I thought it would be. However, I am confident that there are more use cases out there.

There is a current attempt to do just this. It is by nightnic, however it only targets the Windows platform. One of the bigger hindrances of making your own API for TrueCrypt is that the source isn’t very extendable. For a user to include the API custom support, he or she would have to compile the source and patch in the API source. Additionally, from the looks of it TrueCrypt has a legal document in front of the source that may scare away those who wish to extend TrueCrypt.

Links I’ve Found Interesting in the Last Week/Technical Things I’ve found Interesting (6 January 2013)

  • Getting the “Application Server Libraries not found” error with IntelliJ when you try to add a local Tomcat server? If you’re using Gentoo it’s a matter of file locations. Install the tomcat-api package, and make a symbolic link from the API within the Common and Shared Tomcat directories. Source.
  • Tomcat 7 has changed around how resources can be accessed. You can no longer use “getResourceAsStream” to get files placed in the Web-inf/Classes folder. Instead, you should attempt to get the resource through the context of the local thread. An example: Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(). This is useful for applications that use JasperReports [location of the JRXML file], and that are web applications. Source.
  •  If you are trying to stand up a web server, and don’t want to allow it to accept public connections? Set the accepted connections on tomcat to only listen on the local address. For tomcat see this. For NGinx see and set it only set listen to 127.0.0.1:[port].
  • Converting a GUI Netbeans project into a Maven based project? Most of the needed libraries will be covered by the default Maven repositories. However the swing-layout dependency is a special case. To use include the Netbeans repository reference, and include the swing-layout-1.0,4 dependency.
    Repository:

    <repositories> 
   <repository>
      <id>netbeans</id>
      <name>NetBeans</name>
      <url>http://bits.netbeans.org/maven2/</url>
   </repository>
</repositories>

    Dependency:

    <dependency>
   <groupId>org.netbeans.external</groupId>
   <artifactId>swing-layout-1.0.4</artifactId>
   <version>RELEASE691</version>
</dependency>
  • Ignoring failed tests on a maven build: Add this parameter to your mvn command: -Dmaven.test.skip=true
  • Sort directories and files with a human readable format: This is like ls –Sh, but it traverses directories.
  • If you have a set of directories to ignore, SVN propset includes an option to recursively ignore specified names/folders. A word of warning propset overwrites any svn:ignore properties.