Distributed Secure Email Protocol

By Brendan Long on August 23, 2013

I've been reading about BitMessage, an anonymous, encrypted peer-to-peer email protocol. Unfortunately, there are some major problems:

BitMessage addresses are 36-character hashes, which isn't very user friendly.
Since the address is the hash of your public key, there's no way to change your keys without creating a new address …

Python Encryption Example

By Brendan Long on May 27, 2013

This program was written to demonstrate how to correctly encrypt and decrypt files, using PBKDF2-SHA1, AES, and HMAC-MD5.

Timing attacks and usernames

By Brendan Long on February 24, 2012

Today, I found an interesting article about password timing attacks. The basic point is that if you check a password one character at a time, the amount of time it takes to receive a "bad password" response tells you how many characters you got right.

Now with SSL goodness

By Brendan Long on September 05, 2011

I set up an SSL certificate for this site today and it was surprisingly easy.

Last time I wanted a free certificate, it was a huge pain. This time it was actually easy. A Google search for "ssl certificates stackoverflow" lead me to the Cheapest web certificates question …