Fuzzing
Fuzzing is a great way to find input validation errors.
Just don’t use it in debug mode whith all input printed verbatim to the poor terminal… :-|
digital vs. analog notes
Now that I wrote my midterm summary and completed the survey for GSoC it is once again time to update the Trac-pages. The syslogd is my first try with Trac and so far it has not been too sucessful.
The State of transport-tls and its Implementation
Now the latest internet draft for transport-tls is out for two weeks now and it looks like a consensus on the text is found — at least there were no comments so far. I spent the better part of these two weeks changing and debugging my own implementation of transport-tls, which is far beyond the schedule but at least in time to have a working and usable program for mid-term evaluation…
So this is a good time to re-read the draft and check its requirements against my current syslogd code:
Mozilla X.509 certificates from the command line
Problem: You administer office PCs and have to deploy your organization’s new CA certificate. Since you know your users, telling them individually to download and install it is not an option. You need an automatic solution for unattended installation.
on OpenSSL and documentation …
I think OpenSSL needs a documentation project. My first week of GSoC coding was dedicated to transport-tls, so I started with establishing a TLS connection and accessing different parts of the X.509 certificates to check them. I would have thought these are basic tasks for every TLS-enabled application and yet I found this unexpectedly difficult.
reliable TCP reconnect made easy
When I came to work on Syslog one of the most disturbing texts I came across was Rainer’s observation “On the (un)reliability of plain tcp syslog…“. The problem is that a sendmsg() system call is nearly always successful — it only indicates local errors (like a full send queue), but no network errors. So even after the other side initiated a connection shutdown one can happily write into the local buffer and only get an error on the second write.
Yet another Dvorak-international layout
Ich benutze seit rund einem Jahr ein Dvorak-Tastaturlayout. Leider ist es garnicht so einfach da ein “gutes” Layout zu finden.
Use syslog-sign with changing structured data elements
The structured data (SD) in syslog-protocol offers some interesting possibilities when it comes to modifying a message in transit. What would be necessary to enable rewriting in transit while still be able to authenticate by syslog-sign?