Skills

So there’s an emergency. The power is out, and your neighbor comes by to borrow a candle. It’s no big deal, you lend them one of your hurricane lanterns, so they can have light and be safe. You don’t even think twice about it. When it’s a short-term emergency, this is a standard response, and it’s very reasonable. When there is a better-than-coin-toss likelihood of replenishing your stash of any given item in the near future (“near” being defined however you like), lending or gifting is not a big deal.

If we’re dealing with a big emergency, though, this may not be the case. Suddenly, giving something to your friend or neighbor seems a lot less reasonable. You have to weigh the possibility that you may not be able to get more of whatever it is you’re lending, before you run out yourself.

It’s not easy to say no. It’s a skill, and it’s one you have to practice, as with all other skills. Unlike most of the other prepping skills, it comes with an emotional cost that far surpasses its use.

Consider this scenario: It’s the apocalypse, however you see that. You’re fairly well situated, and have “enough” of stuff that you’re not hurting. But you’re budgeting every calorie, and watching the weather to know what to do next. Your neighbor comes by and asks to “borrow” a candle. They have kids, and those kids are afraid of the dark, and she knows you have extras… Suddenly, it’s not so easy to say no. Note the kids, because that’s the gotcha that many people will inveigle into the conversation if they think it’ll get you to part with your goods.

It’s easy to say that they ought to have prepared in advance, like you did. And it’s true, the parents should have prepared. The kids, though, are not responsible for their parents’ stupidity or lack of forethought. So what do you do? You still say no.

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I’m not a huge creamed corn fan, but wow, this was delicious! It was a bright, sunny looking meal on a miserable, chill evening. The sweetness of the corn complimented the savory chicken, and the entire dish came together in under an hour. I hope you enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs chicken breasts, cut into strips
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 2 cans of corn (15 oz each) strained
• 1-1/2 cups milk
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion, diced
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tsp of dry oregano
• 2 sprigs of fresh thyme
• 1 pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
• salt and pepper to taste
• fresh cilantro for garnish (optional)

On a plate or platter, lay out the chicken strips. Drizzle them with a tablespoon of olive oil, and season with salt and pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. Set the chicken to the side.

Add the first can of drained corn into your blender or food processor and add in the milk. Blend until this is smooth, then set it aside.

In a large sauce pan, heat the remaining olive oil over a medium high heat. Add in the chicken strips and sear until they are golden brown. Don’t rush this! You  may need to do it in stages, depending on the size and depth of your pan. Don’t crowd the pan; it’s better to do several batches than to try and shove them all in at the same time. When the strips are seared, remove them and rest them on a plate.

In the pan you just removed the chicken from, add in the onion and saute until it’s soft and translucent. Add in the minced garlic, and saute until it is fragrant, about a minute. Add in the pinch of red pepper flakes (if desired), oregano, and thyme. Stir to combine.

Pour the corn and the corn and milk mixture into the pan over the onions and herbs. Stir well, and then simmer until it begins to thicken. Season it with salt and pepper, to taste.

Remove the sprigs of thyme, and add in the butter and cheese. Fold it in gently, and let it simmer for another few minutes until it’s all incorporated. Return the chicken and the juices to the pan, cover, and let it simmer for another few minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce is thick and gravy-like.

Notes:

I didn’t use fresh thyme. Instead, I used a teaspoon of dried thyme. It worked fine! I used oat milk, because I can’t do dairy, but regular milk would be great. I used plant based “butter,” and I added the cheese at the very end, so I could have mine (with plant based “cheese”) separate from everyone else’s (with real cheese). That worked out relatively well, to be honest. I served it up with some pasta, but it would have gone equally well with rice or mashed potatoes.

It does need a vegetable, as corn really doesn’t pause much on its way through you. I went with carrots, because it was such a bright yellow that I thought it needed some orange in there. I boiled them, then sauteed them in olive oil and garlic, and served them on the side.

Networking used to be simple. It is unclear to me why I think that. Maybe because when I started all of this, it was simple.

Networks are broken down into two major classes, Point-to-Point (P2P) or broadcast. When you transmit on a P2P port, the data goes to a dedicated port on the other side of a physical link. There it comes out.

Each port is provided an IP address. A routing table tells the router which port to transmit on to reach a particular network. A router works in a store and forward procedure. It reads the entire packet from a port, then retransmits that packet, modified as needed, on a different port.

A broadcast network is one where multiple devices are connected to a single physical network. What is transmitted on the link is heard by all the other nodes on the same physical network.

Originally, that physical network was a switch. Your network card would connect to a switch, the switch then transmits everything it receives on one port to all other ports.

Switches could be connected to each other. The only requirement was that of time. The amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from one end of the physical network to the other was limited. If it took more time than that limit, the network became unstable.

This concept of everything going back to a single switch was expensive. The cabling was expensive, the switch was expensive, the network card was expensive. A working network started at around $50,000. $30K for the switch, $10K for each network card. Hundreds of dollars for cabling.

The original Internet protocol was only going to have addressing for 65,000 machines. How many machines would be network attached if each site required $50k just to get one or two machines hooked up. We compromised at 4 billion.

We are working on getting everything on IP version 6 with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses. I think somebody told me that that is enough addresses for every atom in the known universe to have an IPv6 address.

From those expensive switches, we moved to 2-base-10 and “thick” Ethernet. These had the same limitations, but the costs were starting to come down. Something around $1000 to get into thick net and a few hundred to get into thin net.

Routers were still expensive. With the advent of 10baseT, we saw costs drop again. You could get an Ethernet hub for under a hundred dollars. Routers were only a few thousand. The world was good.

The other day I purchased an 8 port 10 Gigabit router for under a hundred dollars. It has 160 Gigabit internal switching. This means it can move 10 Gigabit per second from and to every port.

It cost less than $35 for two fiber transceivers. It cost around $33 for an Intel-based NIC capable of 10 Gigabits.

This means that I can upgrade a server to 10 Gibibit capability for around $60. Not bad.

A Step Forward

My data center was rather small. It was set up as a single /23 (512 addresses) connected via L2 switches. The switches were all one Gigabit copper.

You can buy 10 Gigabit L2 switches, but they are either copper, with limited distances and a need for high-quality cabling, or they are expensive.

Moving to an L3 device got me a better price and more features.

Moving to an L3 router gave me some more options. One of the big ones is the ability to have multiple paths to each device to provide high availability.

This requires that each node have multiple network interfaces and multiple routers and switchers. With the routers being cross connected, with each node being able to handle multi-path communications.

This is the step forward.

A step backwards

This High Availability (HA) solution requires multi-path capabilities. This is not always available for every piece of software. I want to keep things simple.

A Solution

A solution is to move from a physical network with multiple paths and redundant capabilities to virtual networking.

Each node will have two physical network interfaces. The interfaces will route using OSPF. This is a quick response system that will find other paths if one link or router fails. This provides the HA I want for the network.

Each node will have two VPCs for the ceph cluster, one or more VPC for each container system, and one or more VPC for each VM cluster. A VPC is a “virtual private cloud” It is a virtual network with only allowed traffic.

You can have multiple networks on a single physical network. For example, you can have 192.168.0.0/24 be your “regular” subnet and 172.16.5.0/24 be your data plane subnet. A network interface configured as 192.168.0.7 will only “hear” traffic on subnet 192.168.0.0/24.

But you can configure a network interface to hear every packet. Allowing a node to “spy” on all traffic.

With a VPC, there is only subnet 192.168.0.0/24 on the one VPC and only 172.16.5.0/24 on the other. Packets are not switched from one VPC to the other. You need a router to move data from one VPC to another. And the two VPCs must have different subnets; otherwise the router doesn’t know what to do.

OVN Logical Switch

It turns out that a VPC is the same as an OVN logical switch. Any traffic on one logical switch is restricted to that switch. You need to send traffic to a logical router to get the traffic in or out of the VPC.

Since the traffic is going through a router, that router can apply many filters and rules to protect the VPC from leaking data or accepting unwanted data.

I configured 4 VPCs for testing. DMZ is part of the physical network. Any virtual port on the DMZ VPC is exposed to traffic on the physical network. This is how traffic can enter or exit the virtual clouds.

The second VPC is “internal”. This is a network for every physical node to exist. By using the internal VPC, each node can communicate with each other, regardless of the physical topology.

That was working.

There was a data plane VPC and a management VPC. Those VPCs were connected to the DMZ through a router. The router is distributed across multiple nodes. If one node goes down, the other node is ready to take up the traffic.

Falling way back

I now have a VPC for testing. The idea is to test everything extensively before moving any nodes to the virtual network. I need to be able to reboot any node and have everything still function.

The VPC came up perfectly. My notes made it easy to create the VPC and configure it.

The problem began when I added a router to the VPC.

Now I can’t get traffic to flow to the VPC.

WTF?

Light is a topic that’s come up a few times in my prepper discussions, and so I thought it deserved its own article. Light is defined as “…something that makes vision possible.” (Merriam Webster) We call the light part of our day, aptly enough, daytime. We can see to study, to teach, to learn, and to do. For hundreds and thousands of years, light has been of immense importance to human beings.

The first light was, of course, the sun. Light happened during the day, and night was when you huddled together and tried not to get eaten. The purposeful use of fire is the second light. Fire allowed us to do things in the dark. It kept predators at bay. It warmed our bodies, our food, and even our souls. Once fire was harnessed, it was more a matter of what method to invent to keep the light on at night, safely and effectively.

Some of the earliest lanterns were Canaanite oil lamps. These were basically pinch pots, or rather, a shallow bowl with a pinched spout at one end for holding a wick. These open candles go back farther than our written history. I can say with authority that they do work, too, having both made and used some myself. From a prepping standpoint, open candles can be made out of just about anything. A wick in a bowl works, especially if you can float the wick somehow. Consider an old cork with a hole in it to hold a wick, floating on an oil source.

Fuel oil in early times came from animal fat, or from nut oils. Tallow candles were used as early as 500 BCE, in Rome. They continued to be used until modern paraffin became easily available. Paraffin wax was quickly adopted, because it had almost no smell at all. Candles made from tallow or other animal fats were quite stinky.

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I love this soup, and it can be made with just the squash, or with the pears as well. I think the sweetness of the pears really adds a depth to the soup that the squash alone doesn’t have. If you want to impress your family, serve this in a hollowed out large squash (such as a pumpkin or hubbard squash). What a centerpiece!

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs butternut squash
• 3 tbsp butter
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tsp minced fresh ginger root
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 cups chicken broth
• 2 Bartlett pears, peeled, cored, chopped into 1″ cubes
• ½ cup half and half

Preheat your oven to 375F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut your squash in half lengthwise, remove the seeds and stringy bits. Place the squash halves, cut sides down on the prepared baking sheet. Roast in your preheated oven until very soft, about 45 minutes. Allow the squash to cool slightly, and then scoop out the meat into a bowl. The skin can be discarded.

Melt the butter in a stout soup pot over medium heat. Stir in the onion, garlic, ginger, curry powder, and salt. Cook and stir until the onion is soft, about 10 minutes. Pour the chicken broth into the pot, and bring it to a boil. Stir in the pear chunks and the reserved squash, and simmer until the pears are very soft, about 30 minutes.

Puree your soup into a smooth liquid. This can be done in a blender, but you must be careful and do it in batches with the pitcher only half full. I prefer to use a stick blender, which can be done right in the pot. You could also use a food processor, but I’d be careful not to have back splash.

Stir in the half and half, and gently whisk to combine. Reheat the soup before serving, if necessary.

If you want to make this pretty, to each bowl add a drizzle of heavy cream over the top and swirl gently with a spoon to make circles of white. Add a sprig of mint or oregano and a couple of pomegranate seeds, and serve.

Notes:

When I make this, I always double or triple the amount of curry I use. You want to be able to really taste the curry flavor. If you have people who are unable to tolerate heat, try using a shwarma blend of curry spices.  It packs a hearty flavor punch without burning the lips off. A spicier curry powder can be added at table, or red pepper flakes, for those who like heat. Alternatively, you can sprinkle a good quality chili pepper oil over the surface instead of cream.

An alternative and more meaty approach to this recipe is to add in leftover Thanksgiving turkey, and serve it the following day with leftover rolls or sliced bread.

I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm.

A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices.

Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it or processes it, the results are sent to an output devices. I/O devices allow the input from disks, keyboards, persistent storage devices, networks or other devices. They also send output to video devices, networks, printers, and storage devices.

The thing that defines how a computer can be configured is the motherboard. The motherboard accepts one or more processors, one or more memory devices, one or more I/O devices.

Some motherboards come with built-in I/O devices. For example, A motherboard will come with built-in disk controllers, sound cards, video drivers, USB controllers, P/S-2 keyboard and mouse, serial drivers and many more. These are the connectors that you see on the back of your computer or elsewhere on the case.

Many of these drivers lead to a connector or a socket. If your motherboard has SATA disk controllers, there will be SATA connectors on the motherboard. If your motherboard has built-in video, the back will have an ISA video connector and/or an HDMI connector. It might have a DVI connector as well.

The covers most of what you find on the motherboard. The rest are the important sockets.

There will normally be extension slots. These are where you would plug in extra I/O devices, such as network cards, disk controllers, or video cards. There will normally be memory slots. Depending on the amount of memory supported by the CPU and motherboard, this could be two, four, eight, or even more. Finally, there is normally a socket for the CPU.

For me, I have found that the cheapest way to upgrade a computer is to give it more memory. Most software is memory intensive. If you exceed the amount of memory in your machine, your machine has to make space for the program you want to run. Then it has to read into memory, from disk, the program or its data before it can continue.

The more memory, the less “paging” needs to happen.

Upgrading the CPU is another possibility. This is normally a fairly reasonable thing to do. Consider an AMD Ryzen 7 3700, which is the CPU in one of my machines. It runs $150 on Amazon, today. I purchased it for $310 a few years ago.

Today, I can upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950x from a Ryzen 7 3700x for $350.

Buying the latest and greatest CPU is expensive. Buying second tier, older CPUs is much more price effective.

The motherboard in this particular server is nearing its end of life. It has an AM4 socket, which has been replaced with the AM5 socket. This means it is unlike that any “new” CPUs will be released for the AM4.

Bad Design

The first place I see bad computer designs is in the actual case. This is not as bad as it used to be. It used to be that opening an HP case was sure to get you sliced up. Every edge was razor sharp.

The next major “bad design” is a case and motherboard combination which is non-standard. The only motherboard that will ever fit in that case is a motherboard from that company. Likely the only place to get such a motherboard is from E-Bay.

The next issue is when there are not enough memory slots, or worse, not enough memory addressing lines. Apple was actually famous for this.

In the old days, Apple used a 68020 class CPU. The CPU that they were using had a 32-bit address register. This is 4 Gigabytes of addressing. More than enough for the time period. Except…

Apple didn’t use all 32 bits, they only used 24 bits, leaving 8 bits unused. This gives 16 Megabytes of addressable memory. More than enough in a time period where people still remembered Billy saying “Nobody will ever need more than 640 Kilobytes of memory”.

Apple made use of the extra 8 bits in the address register for “Handles”. Not important.

Most CPUs today use a 64-bit address registers. I don’t know of a CPU that uses all 64 bits for addressing.

Which takes us to bad designs, again. Some motherboards only bring enough address lines to the memory slots to handle what is the “largest” memory card currently available. This means that you can have slots that support 16 Gigabyte DIMMs, but the motherboard only supports 4 Gigabyte DIMMs.

Often, it is worse. Cheaper motherboards will only have 2 DIMM slots. There is nothing more frustrating than having a machine with 8 GB of memory and finding out that it isn’t one 8 GB DIMM leaving room for another 8 GB, but instead two 4 GB DIMMs. Which means that when you receive that 8 GB DIMM you have 12 GB total instead of the goal of 16 GB, and you have a 4 GB DIMM that isn’t good for anything.

Sub Conclusion

If you want to be able to upgrade your computer, buy a motherboard with the latest socket design. AMD or Intel. Buy one that has enough DIMM slots to handle 4 times the amount of memory you think you are going to need. Buy a CPU that is at 1/4 to 1/3 the price of the top-tier CPU. Depending on the release date, maybe even less than that.

Make sure it has a slot for your video card AND having one PCIe-16 slot still open. You might never use it, but if you need it, you will be very frustrated at saving yourself $10.

Source of the rant

My wife is using an employer supplied laptop for her work. All of her personal work has to be done on her phone. With the kids off to university, their old HP AIO computer is available.

The only problem is that word “OLD”. A quick online search shows that I should be able to upgrade the memory from 4 GB to 16 GB and the CPU from an old Intel to an i7 CPU. This means that I can bring this shell back to life for my wife to use.

At the same time, I intend to replace a noisy fan.

Looking online, the cost of a replacement CPU will be $25. The cost of the memory, another $25. Plus $25 for a new keyboard and mouse combination. $75 for a renewed computer. Happiness exists.

Before I order anything, I boot into my Linux “rescue/install” USB thumb drive. I run lscpu and it spits out the CPU type. Which is AMD. AMD sockets do NOT support i7 CPUs. This means that my online research does not match what my software is saying. I trust the software more than the research.

Turns out that there are two versions of this particular All In One model. One is AMD-based, the other is Intel-based. The Intel-based version has a socketed CPU. The AMD version has the CPU soldered into place. It cannot be upgraded.

These maroons have rendered this machine locked in the past. With no way to upgrade the CPU, it is too slow for today’s needs. Even with maximum memory.

Conclusion

An old computer is sometimes garbage. Put it out of your misery. Use it for target practice or take it to the dump.

A few weeks ago, I went up to the Fort at #4 to use their warping board. I have a warping board, I just do not know where it is. I could make a warping board, I didn’t want to spend the time to do so.

On the way up, I stopped to pick up some more yarn for the warp. I have some yarn for the weft and I intend to spin more and have my wife dye it.

They didn’t have what I needed in stock. While the clerk went down to the warehouse to get more, I was introduced to the fiber club. This was three or four older women who had been working in fiber arts for some period of time.

“YES!” I thought, I was going to have a chance to learn something about spinning or weaving, or fiber prep. There must be a wealth of knowledge there.

But first I had to teach them how I clean my fleeces before combing or carding.

Then they wanted to know why I combed my fleeces, they had tried, but it didn’t work for them.

So then I ended up teaching them how to comb the fibers.

And I taught them how to put the flocks properly on the comb so that they aligned correctly.

When the clerk finally arrived with the rest of my yarn, I had spent the entire time in teaching mode. I had learned more about teaching. I hadn’t learned anything new about fiber prep, spinning, knitting or weaving.

At The Fort

As we drove into the fort to offload, the blacksmith waved at us. I figured this was meant that I would get a chance to play at the forge. It has been years since I was in a position to do any blacksmithing.

As I drove out, there was nobody at the smithy. Darn.

Back to Ally, in the house. I start combing some wool, just to keep my hands doing something. Shortly, our blacksmith comes in.

It is a younger man. We get to talking, and it is cool to hear about his skills.

We started talking about types of steel. The neat thing is that I know which steels I want and what their characteristics are. He was telling me the composition of the different steels. Amazing. I gave him some references to metal sources that he might be able to use.

He is primarily a blade smith. I’ve seen too many so-called “knife makers” to think it has any real meaning. Hell, even my brother makes knives. So I took the “trust, but verify” path.

Later, I went over to the smithy with him to sharpen a froe and to get him started on making a reproduction to use in the jointing shop.

It was interesting because this froe blade had seen some “repairs”. By repairs, I mean that somebody had wielded strange metal to the tip and maybe along the entire cutting edge.

Sam was using a file to sharpen and kept asking me if I thought the metal was hardened. It is a sort of test. People who work with metal can feel how hard a metal is based on how it files. He was doing a very polite test.

Then I was invited to actually do something at the forge.

Before I began, he taught me how to create a good, hot, fire. This is something I’ve done. But a method he used, of reaching under the fire to lift it, causing the crust to crack, is something I didn’t know how to do. I’ve always cracked the crust with my poker.

He wasn’t teaching, he was just doing.

Next he put a piece of iron rod in there to let me work it. On my first heat he couldn’t handle my lack of skill. I thought I knew what I was doing, I did not.

In 30 seconds, he demonstrated four or five things I was doing wrong. I learned.

I was intending to make a J-hook. There was a call for lunch, so he finished it up quickly, with me watching and taking mental notes. It was a wonderful learning experience.

History

After lunch, I was peopled out, I had worked with some visitors, now it was time to escape the people. I headed to the truck. Except, my keys are back in my jacket. Not with me in my 1700s garb. I go to see Sam at the shop.

After a bit, some visitors came to see what he was working on. The then proceeds to give a 30-minute lecture on trade knives of the 1750s. How they were made, what the differences are, why they were made the way they were, and who would be using them, and why.

He had manipulatives (knifes without handles) to show the visitors. He explained each type clearly.

I’ve been collecting knives since the 1980s. I learned more about knives in general, in that 30 minutes, than I have in the past 40 years.

It is wonderful to have somebody to learn from.

There are two main options, should the shit actually ever hit the fan: bugging in, or bugging out. Yes, there are variations to both of those, but that’s essentially your two choices in their most basic form. I’ve talked about bugging in a bit, and about hiding in forests and building shelters and such. But what about bugging out?

If you’ve decided (for whatever reason) to leave your home during an emergency, you have to address the issue of travel. Near as I can tell, you have a very limited number of methods to travel in the average bug out situation:

• your vehicle
• a non-motorized method of transport (ie a bicycle, unicycle, scooter, skateboard, etc.)
• riding an animal (horse, llama, sheep, yak, whatever)
• walking

Your vehicle, be it a car, truck, camper van, or motorcycle, is probably your first thought. I know it’s mine. My car already has a bug out bag in it, and in winter there’s always a 72 hour survival bucket stashed in the back, just in case. Your vehicle (other than the motorcycle, for the most part) is also a type of shelter, somewhere to be secure with doors locked, out of the rain and wind and snow, with at least somewhat comfortable sleeping arrangements. You can also cart things with you in a vehicle, such as food, clothing, emergency shelter like tents and tarps, first aid items, and weapons with ammo.

There’s a major drawback with vehicles, though. They run on fuel. If you run out of fuel, you stop. Now, if you carry a siphon kit (and I do recommend it, because sucking gas out of a tank without one is a very unpleasant thing indeed, and no I don’t want to talk about it), you can remove fuel from other vehicles. If the movies (and images of war torn countries) are reliable, you’ll probably find abandoned cars and trucks at the side of (or in the middle of) the roads. These can be checked for abandoned fuel, depending on your situation, and you can take from them if they have any.

You can carry extra fuel with you, though you may want to be careful about how you do that. You shouldn’t really carry fuel inside a vehicle, and if you have it on the outside, you’re advertising to everyone that you have fuel to spare. Whether it’s FEMA, desperate parents, or raiders, you could lose that extra fuel if you stop. Disguising it (fuel canisters inside empty suitcases?) might be your best bet, along with securing them with locks, and protecting yourself and your gear using firearms.

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There are two parts to access control, the first is authentication, the second is authorization.

Authentication is the process of proving you are who you claim to be.

There are three ways to prove you are who you say you are, something you know, something you have, or something about you.

When you hand your driver’s license to the police officer at a traffic stop, you are authenticating yourself. You are using two-factor authentication. The first part is that you have that particular physical license in your possession. The second is that the picture on the ID matches you.

After the officer matches you to the ID you provided, he then proceeds to authenticate the ID. Does it have all the security markings? Does the picture on the DL match the picture that his in-car computer provides to him? Does the description on the DL match the image on the card?

He will then determine if you are authorized to drive. He does this by checking with a trusted source that the ID that he holds is not suspended.

People Are Stupid

While you are brilliant, all those other people are stupid.

So consider this scenario. Somebody claims that they can read your palm and figure things out about you. Your favorite uncle on your mother’s side of the family is Bill Jones. You laugh and reply, you got that wrong, James Fillmore is my favorite uncle.

So, one of the more common security questions to recover a password is “What is your mother’s maiden name?” Do you think that the person who just guessed your favorite uncle incorrectly might do better at guessing your mother’s maiden name?

It was assumed that only you know that information. The fact is that the information is out there, it just takes a bit of digging.

The HR department at a client that I used to work for liked to announce people’s birthdays, to make them feel good.

She announced my birthday over the group chat. I went into her office and explained that she had just violated my privacy.

The next time you are at the doctor’s office, consider what they use to authenticate you. “What is your name and date of birth?”

I lie every time some website asks for my date of birth, unless it is required for official reasons.

Finally, people like to pick PINs and codes that they can remember. And they use things that match what they remember. What is a four-digit number that is easy for most people to remember? The year of their birth.

You do not want to know how many people use their year of birth for their ATM PIN.

In addition, it is easy to fool people into giving you their password. We call that phishing today. But it is the case that many people will read that their account has been compromised and rush to fix it. Often by clicking on the link in the provided e-mail.

A few years back, I was dealing with a creditor. They have a requirement to not give out information. A blind call asking me to authenticate myself to them. I refused. I made them give me the name of their company as well as their extension and employ number.

I then looked up the company on the web. Verified that the site had been in existence for multiple years. Verified with multiple sources what their main number was. Then called the main number and asked to be connected to the representative.

Did this properly authenticate her? Not really, but it did allow us to move forward until we had cross authenticated each other.

Biometrics

If you have watched NCIS, they have a magic gizmo on the outside of the secure room. To gain access, the cop looks into the retina scanner. The scanner verifies that pattern it scans with what is on record and, if you are authorized, unlocks the door.

Older shows and movies used palm scanners or fingerprint scanners. The number of movies in which the MacGuffin is the somebody taking a body part or a person to by-pass biometric scanners is in the 1000s, if not higher.

So let’s say that you are using a biometric to unlock your phone. Be it a face scan or a fingerprint scan.

The bad guys (or the cops) have you and your phone. While they cannot force you to give up your password, they can certainly hold the phone up to your face to unlock it. Or forcibly use your finger to unlock it.

Biometrics are not at the point where I would trust them. Certainly, not cheap biometric scanners.

It Doesn’t Look Good

We need to protect people from themselves. We can’t trust biometrics. That leaves “something they have”.

When you go to open unlock your car, you might use a key fob. Press the button and the car unlocks. That is something you have, and it is what is used to authenticate you. Your car knows that when you authenticate with your key fob, you are authorized to request that the doors be unlocked.

If you are old school, and still use a physical key to unlock your home, the lock in your door uses an inverse pattern to authenticate the key that you possess. It knows that anybody who has that key is authorized to unlock the door.

Since people might bypass the lock or make an unauthorized duplicate of your key, you might add two-factor authentication. Not only do they have to have something in their possession, they must all know the secret code for the alarm.

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-Factor authentication is about providing you with something that only you possess. You need to be able to prove that you have control of that object and that the answer cannot be replayed.

Consider you are coming back from patrol. You reach the gate and the sentry calls out “thunder”. You are supposed to reply with “dance”. You have now authenticated and can proceed.

The bad guy now walks up. The sentry calls out “thunder”. The bad guy repeats what you said, “dance”. And the bad guy now walks through the gate.

This is a “replay” attack. Any time a bad guy can repeat back something that intercepted to gain authentication, you have a feeble authentication.

The first authenticator that I used was a chip on a card. It was the size of a credit card, you were expected to carry it with you. When you tried to log in, you were prompted for a number from the card. The card had a numeric keypad. You input your PIN. The card printed a number. That number was only good for a short time.

You entered that number as your password, and you were authenticated.

There were no magic radios. Bluetooth didn’t exist. Wi-Fi was still years in the future. And it worked even if you were 100s of miles away, logging in over a telnet session or a dial-up modem.

How?

Each card had a unique serial number and a very accurate clock. The time of day was combined with the serial number and your pin to create a number. The computer also knew the time, accurately. When you provided the number, it could run a magic algorithm and verify that the number came from the card with that serial number.

One of the keys to computer security is that we don’t store keys in a recoverable format. Instead, we store cryptographic hashes of your password. We apply the same hash to the password/pass phrase you provided us and then compare that to the stored hash. If they match, the password is correct. There is no known methods for going from the hash to the plaintext password.

That security card had some other features. It could be programmed to have a self-destruct PIN, or an alert PIN, or a self-destruct after too many PIN entries in a given amount of time.

When it self-destructed, it just changed an internal number, so the numbers generated would never again be correct. If the alert PIN was set up, using the generated number would inform the computer that the PIN was given under duress. The security policies would determine what happened next.

Today, we started to see simple two-factor authentication. “We sent a text to your phone, enter the number you received.” “We emailed the account on record, read and click on the link.”

These depend on you having control of your email account or your phone. And that nobody is capable of intercepting the SMS text.

A slightly more sophisticated method is a push alert to an app on your phone. This method requires radio communications with your phone app. The site requesting you to authenticate transmits a code to your phone app. Your phone app then gives you a code to give to the site. Thus, authenticating you.

There are other pieces of magic involved in these. It isn’t a simple number, there is a bunch of math/cryptology involved.

Another method is using your phone to replace the card described above.

I authenticate to my phone to prove I’m authorized to run the authenticator application. There is a 6-digit number I have to transcribe to the website within 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, a new number appears.

I’ve not looked into all the options available, it just works.

The cool thing about that authenticator, is that it works, even if all the radios in my phone are off.

Finally, there are security keys. This is what I prefer.

I need to put the key into the USB port. The key and the website exchange information. I press the button on the security key, and I’m authenticated.

Another version requires me to type a passphrase to unlock the key before it will authenticate to the remote site.

Conclusion

If you have an option, set up two-factor authentication. Be it an authenticator app on your phone or a Yubico security key. It will help protect you from stupids.

Data security is the protection of your data throughout its lifecycle.

Let’s pretend you have a naughty image of yourself that you don’t want anybody else to see.

The most secure way of protecting that image is to have never taken that image in the first place. It is too late now.

If you put that image on a portable USB drive, then somebody can walk off with that USB drive. The protection on that image is only as good as the physical security of that device.

Dick, the kiddy diddler, who is in the special prison for the rest of his life, kept his kiddy porn on USB thumb drives. They were stored around his bed. Once the cops served their warrant, all of those USB drives were available to be examined.

They were examined. Dick was evil and stupid.

The next best way is to encrypt the image using a good encryption tool.

To put this in perspective, the old Unix crypt program implemented an improved version of the German Enigma machine. It was improved because it could encrypt/decrypt a 256 character alphabet rather than the original 27 characters.

Using the crypt breakers workbench, a novice can crack a document encrypted with the Unix crypt command in about 30 minutes.

At the time, crypt was the only “good” encryption available at the command line. The only other was a rot-13 style obfuscation tool.

In our modern times, we have access to real cryptography. Some of it superb. We will consider using AES-256, the American Encryption Standard. This is currently considered secure into the 2050s at current compute power increases.

AES-256 uses a 256-bit key. You are not going to remember a 256-bit number. That is a hex number 64 characters long. So you use something like PGP/GnuPG. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy.

In its simplest form, you provide a passphrase to the tool, and it converts that into a 256-bit number, which is used to encrypt the file. Now make sure you don’t forget the pass phrase and also that you delete (for real) the original image.

Now, if you want to view that image, why I don’t know, you have to reverse the process. You will again have the decrypted file on your disk while you examine the image. Don’t forget to remove it when you are done looking.

We can take this to a different level, by using the public key capabilities of PGP. In this process, you generate two large, nearly prime, numbers. These numbers, with some manipulation, are used to encrypt keys. These are manipulated into a Public Key and a Private Key. The public key can decrypt files encrypted with the private key. The private key can decrypt files encrypted with the public key.

The computer now uses a good random number generator to create a 256-bit key. That key is used to encrypt your plaintext file. The key is then encrypted with your “Public Key” and attached to the file.

Now you can decrypt the file using your “Private Key”.

This means that your private key is now the most valuable thing. So you encrypt that with a pass phrase.

Now you need to provide the pass phrase to the PGP program to enable it to decrypt your private key, which you can then use to decrypt or encrypt files. All great stuff.

I went a step further. My PGP key requires a security fob to decrypt. This means it requires something I know, a pass phrase, plus something I have, the security fob.

This means that there are two valuable items you have, the private key and your pass phrase. Let’s just say that those need both physical and mental protection. You need to make sure that nobody can see you type in your pass phrase, plus your pass phrase has to be something you can remember, plus it has to be long enough that your fingers can’t be read as you type it.

And, don’t ever type it on a wireless keyboard. You would have to trust that nobody is intercepting the transmission from the keyboard to the computer system.

In addition to that, most keyboards are electronically noisy. This means that the electrical interference that is given off by your keyboard can be read and used to guess at key sequences.

Finally, you need to make sure that nobody has installed a keylogger to capture every key you type. These can go inside your keyboard, or just plug into the end of your USB cable.

All of this is painful to do. And you need to go through the decryption phase every time you want to look at your secret document.

So we can use disk encryption.

The idea here is similar to PGP. You generate a large block of random bits. This will be your encryption/decryption key. This block of random bits is then encrypted with a pass phrase. When you mount your disk drive, you need to “unlock” the decryption key. Once that is done, the data on that disk is accessible in plain format.

You can tell your computer to forget the key and then none of the data is available. You can unmount the file system and the data is protected. You can turn off your computer and the data is now unavailable and protected.

Of course, they might have your pass phrase, in which case they will just use it to decrypt your key.

But there is a neat thing that you can do, you can wipe the decryption key. If this is done, then even with your pass phrase, there is nothing that can be done.

The government has strict requirements on how to erase magnetic media, disk drives, magnetic tapes, and the like. For magnetic tape, they use a machine that has a strong magnetic field. This field will scramble any data on the tape if used correctly.

This is not good enough for disk drives, though. The “short” version of erasing a magnetic disk is to write all zeros, then write all ones, then write random numbers. This will make it difficult to recover the data. The longer version, “Gutman”, requires 35 passes.

Sounds good, let’s do it on a test drive. Here is a 12 TB drive that is 75% full. The 75% doesn’t help us. We still need to erase every sector.

Our SATA 3, 6 Gbit I/O channel is not our bottleneck, it is the time to write the data. That is 210 Mbit/second. So more than five days, per pass.

If we have encrypted the drive, we only have to wipe a few sectors. That can be done in far less than a second.

But, it gets better. You can buy “secure” drives. These drives have the encryption built in. You send a magic command to the drive, and it wipes its key and makes the entire disk just random bits, nearly instantly.

This key on disk method is what Ceph uses, under the hood.

Of course, that is only part of the solution, the next part is on the wire encryption. This requires still more.

Conclusion

The biggest issue facing people who are trying to create secure environments is that they need to make sure that they have identified who the black hat is.

• Will they be able to physically access your equipment? Assume yes.
• Will they be able to tap into your network? Assume yes.
• Will they be able to physically compromise your keyboard? Maybe?
• Will they be able to take your stuff?
• Will they be able to force you to give your pass phrase?
• Will they be able to access your computer without a password?
• Will you be able to boot your network from total outage without having to visit each node?