Archive for 'Little-known features' Category
Little known features: HTTP digest authentication
Most people are aware they should check for an SSL connection when logging into a banking web site or other sensitive web application. The little yellow padlock and "https://" prefix are supposed to indicate the web site is "secure" and no one can compromise your sensitive data.
SSL is the only choice for protecting web content [...]
Testing SSL with command line tools
In an post over at the excellent TaoSecurity blog, Richard writes about discovering nssl, an SSL-capable version of netcat. A reader reminded him that the openssl command line utility can also act as an ad hoc SSL client like so
openssl s_client -connect www.example.com:443
The above lets you connect via SSL to a web server and manually [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Little known features: Symmetric encryption with PGP/GPG
A little known feature of both PGP and GPG is that they can do symmetric encryption. Just a passphrase is needed- no public or private keys are involved. It’s a quick and dirty way to get strong encryption that even a novice can use.
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