software

Strategy towards more IT security: the road paved with misconceptions

Albert Zenkoff
2014-07-23
Society, component, conference, future, government, ignorance, internet, IT, management, manufacturing, misconception, network, restrict, secure, security, software, strategy, system

The strategy towards more IT security in the “Internet of Things” is based a little more than entirely on misconceptions and ignorance. The policy makers simply reinforce each other’s “ideas” without any awareness of where the road they follow is leading. As I listened on in the K-ITS 2014 conference, it became painfully obvious that ...

Software Security vs. Food Safety

Albert Zenkoff
2014-02-13
Management, changes, costs, crisis, customer perception, food industry, industry, lessons, security, software

My friend works in a large restaurant chain in St-Petersburg. She is pretty high up in the command after all these years. We talk about all sorts of things when we meet up and once she told me about how they have to deal with safety and quality inspections and how bothersome and expensive they ...

Google bots subversion

Albert Zenkoff
2013-11-09
Technology, application security, attack, bots, Development, firewall, Google, philosophy, secure by design, software, software design, software security, subversion, technology, unexpected

There is a lot of truth in saying that every tool can be used by good and by evil. There is no point in blocking the tools themselves as the attacker will turn to new tools and subvert the very familiar tools in unexpected ways. Now Google crawler bots were turned into such a weapon ...

Password recovery mechanisms – Part 3

Albert Zenkoff
2013-05-22
Technology, advice, captcha, Development, general, guidance, guide, password management, password recovery, passwords, rules, software, software design, user information

Passwords remain the main means of authentication on the internet. People often forget their passwords and then they have to recover their access to the website services through some kind of mechanism. We try to make that so-called “password recovery” simple and automated, of course. There are several ways to do it, all of them ...

Albert Zenkoff
2013-05-08
Management, coverity, Development, management, open source, quality, security scanning, software, source scan, vulnerability report

Coverity is running a source code scan project started by U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, a Net Security article reports. They published their report on quality defects recently pointing out some interesting facts. Coverity is a lot into code quality but they also report security problems. On the other hand, any quality problem ...

Cryptography: just do not!

Albert Zenkoff
2012-10-16
Technology, Algorithm, Cryptography, Development, don't, encryption, hashing, homegrown, philosophy, software, technology

Software developers regularly attempt to create new encryption and hashing algorithms, usually to speed up things. There is only one answer one can give in this respect: Here is a short summary of reasons why you should never meddle in cryptography. Cryptography is mathematics, very advanced mathematics There are only a few good cryptographers and ...

Car software security

Albert Zenkoff
2012-08-21
Society, car, embedded, manual override, news, risk, security, software, virus

I stumbled across an article on car software viruses. I did not see anything unexpected really. The experts “hope” to get it all fixed before the word gets out and things start getting messy. Which tells us that things are in a pretty bad shape right now. The funny thing is though that the academic ...

software