Wow. Things have been busy and I have been neglecting my blog. I feel bad about that. My blog is so important to me, and things have been keeping me away.

I am a teacher at heart. I love to teach. That is why I blog, that is why I present at conferences, and that is why I am going to grad school. So the fact that I have been unable to blog for a while upsets me greatly. But I want to tell you a little bit about why. This is not about making excuses. This is about what is keeping me busy and what I am learning about. It will also motivate me to blog about these things, and that's the important part.

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I keep forgetting to do this. Sorry :(

I have given three presentations so far this year, and I will have 2 or three more et before the end of the year. Here are the slides for the first three in both Keynote and PDF formats.

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One thing that has always bugged the crap out of me is our inability to add additional resource filters to the navigator view in Eclipse. Specifically, I mean these:

Resource filters are very useful little tools that will hide anything that matches the filter from the navigator view. Which is great for things like .svn folders or any other crap you don't feel like you need distracting you at the moment. Like if you want to hide all the images in a project so that it is not as cluttered. But for some reason, we have never been able to add our own filters. So I can't, for example, hide the stupid Settings.xml file that CFB likes to add to my projects or the .settings folder. Grrrrr!!

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A reader emailed me and asked:

I have a question re asymmetric encryption and the best way to achieve it....

I need to encrypt a CreditCard number on one server and store the encrypted string in a db and then 5 minutes later another server takes the card number off that DB and then needs to decrypt it. Any suggestions gratefully received :)

After an e-mail exchange we determined that we were NOT just talking about using SSL between ColdFusion and the DB and we determined that using a symmetric algorithm would not be acceptable to the credit card service. So it seems that this user really did need asymmetric encryption in his application.

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A few weeks ago my buddy Pete Freitag posted his ideas for improving security for CF10 (link) (or whatever they call the next version of ColdFusion). I thought it would be a good idea to post my own ideas.

It's not that I disagree with any of Pete's ideas, I think they are great, I just thought a few more might be good, and I think some of my priorities might be different.

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This last weekend I attended, and spoke at, NCDevCon 2010 in Raleigh, NC. As expected, NCDevCon was a great conference put on by an amazing crew of dedicated volunteers.

Content

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OK, first, let's get this out of the way. I am not a math guy. Not even close. I enjoyed "Math for the Liberal Arts Major" back in my community college days, but I never even completed college algebra (though it is on my list of things to go back and do). So I am about to explain some math, but there is a GOOD chance that I am going to butcher this. If so, please correct me.

Now with my disclaimer out of the way, I can say, "MATH IS COOL"! I really do enjoy the little bit of math that I know and while researching cryptography, I came across a little more. In Cryptography: A very short Introduction I was introduced to modular arithmetic.

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We had a great response to our contest to give away a seat at our "Building Secure CFML Applications" training at cf.Objective() next month. A total of 42 entries.

And the winner is

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It's not very often that you will hear me badmouth ColdFusion, but in this case, I feel compelled. ColdFusion has some truly fantastic features and in many ways make securing web applications easier, but in this case, it has provided little but a false-sense of security.

What is scriptProtect?

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The other day in #coldfusion on DALnet IRC chat, several of us got to talking about passwords and about the simple password strength function that I had made some time ago. We worked on improving the regex and making is a better function. But then we go to talking about whitespace.

One of the people I was talking to asked "Why don't you allow spaces in password?". He saw that my password strength checker did not allow white space in it. This is something I asked myself a while ago, but I never really spent any time thinking about it.

Unfortunately, the only answer I could offer was "I dunno, I thought passwords weren't supposed to have spaces".

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