Posts tagged "security"

Ever since I’ve been using a Mac, I enjoy using Sparse Encrypted Disk Images for a variety of tasks, for instance securely storing data that can be backed up somewhere else, say on a hosting server.

In fact, most of my project/personal data on my Mac sits on sparse encrypted disk images that are regularly rsynced to an external storage service, Strato’s in particular.

The beauty of this solution lies in it simplicity:

Sparse encrypted disk images show up just like any other hard drive. But on the back end, they translate into a bunch of flat files that store all the data in an encrypted manner. By rsyncing the backing store, sparse encrypted disk images can be easily backed up across the net, while ensuring privacy and convenience.

Here’s how to do similar things with Solaris and ZFS, including some extra data integrity magic:

Before we continue our little Performance Analysis Series, let’s look at some current news:

The Bad News: HTTP is dead. Get over it. The killer? It’s called Firesheep, a free Firefox extension that makes it trivially easy for that kid sitting next to you in that Wifi hotspot to steal your Facebook, Twitter or other web services’ identity.

The Victims: The first line of victims are of course millions of unsuspecting users that are sitting in WLAN areas, not knowing that their web identities can be stolen at the click of the button. But the real victims are hundreds, if not thousands of website owners, starting with the who-is-who of web companies, who are now (rightly so) faced with the challenge of upgrading their web infrastructure to HTTPS as soon as possible, preferably overnight.

The Good News: Adding encryption to your web servers used to be an additional burden on the CPU, negatively impacting performance by as much as 2-3x. Fortunately, the new SPARC T3 processors enable you to switch SSL encryption on for your web applications, without any performance impact. This is possible through built-in encryption engines at the core level. And thanks to the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework, it’s easy to take advantage of hardware encryption for any application that needs it.

Wanna learn more? Read on!