Improved HTTPS Performance with Early SSL Termination
This is a neat hack. Since SSL/TLS connection establishment requires lots of consecutive round trips before the connection is ready, by performing that closer to the user and reusing an existing region-to-region connection behind the scenes, the overall latency is greatly improved. Works for HTTP as well
(tags: http https ssl architecture aws ec2 performance latency internet round-trip nginx tls)
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Locking down a webapp with current strict HTTPS policies.
It’s impossible to get to 100% security but there are steps you can take to secure your webapp for your users, to help mitigate against different types of attacks both against you, your webapp and your customers themselves. These are all things we’ve implemented with Server Density v2 to help harden the product as much as possible. These tips are in addition to security best practices such as protecting against SQL injection, filtering, session handling, and XSRF protection. Check out the OWASP cheat sheets and top 10 lists to ensure you’re covered for the basics before implementing the suggestions below.
Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip [PDF]
Wow, I’d missed this:
This paper is a short summary of the ?rst real world detection of a backdoor in a military grade FPGA. Using an innovative patented technique we were able to detect and analyse in the ?rst documented case of its kind, a backdoor inserted into the Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 chips for accessing FPGA con?guration. The backdoor was found amongst additional JTAG functionality and exists on the silicon itself, it was not present in any ?rmware loaded onto the chip. Using Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA), our pioneered technique, we were able to extract the secret key to activate the backdoor, as well as other security keys such as the AES and the Passkey. This way an attacker can extract all the con?guration data from the chip, reprogram crypto and access keys, modify low-level silicon features, access unencrypted con?guration bitstream or permanently damage the device. Clearly this means the device is wide open to intellectual property (IP) theft, fraud, re-programming as well as reverse engineering of the design which allows the introduction of a new backdoor or Trojan. Most concerning, it is not possible to patch the backdoor in chips already deployed, meaning those using this family of chips have to accept the fact they can be easily compromised or will have to be physically replaced after a redesign of the silicon itself.
(tags: chips hardware backdoors security scanning pea jtag actel microsemi silicon fpga trojans)