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.

[More]

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.

[More]

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.

[More]

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.

[More]

In my last few posts we talked a lot about substitution ciphers, but I hinted at transposition ciphers and promised to follow up with a post, so here it is.

Transposition Ciphers

[More]

Right now I am on my way to NCDevCon (Yay for free inflight internet!!).

If you are going to be at the conference this weekend, please do not hesitate to introduce yourself. One of the main reasons I go to conferences is to meet others.

On Saturday I will be speaking about Security in Adobe AIR applications. I will point out that this session is targeted toward experienced AIR developers (either Flex or HTML JS).

Anyway, I am looking forward to the conference. Last year's CFinNC was amazing, and I am positive that this year will be just as good.

In my first entry in this series I challenged you to do a little bit of cryptanalysis. This was, hopefully, a fun exercise to get you thinking about cryptography works and how it can be easily broken if it is not implemented properly.

Of course the examples I am using in this series are extremely simple and I hope that no one would consider using any of them in production code. The point of showing you these things is partly for fun and partly to get you thinking about how cryptanalysts work on cracking more complicated algorithms using crazy mathematics and powerful computers.

[More]

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.

[More]

Wow, 20+ days since my last post. :( It has been a busy few weeks getting ready for cf.Objective() 2010, and I have been slack in my blogging. But no more! Back to it.

Today I am going to continue my security series with a discussion of cryptography. This is a HUGE subject about which I am no expert, but I am learning and, as always, I feel the need to share this knowledge.

Recently I started graduate school and my first class required a research paper. I chose to do an "Introduction to Cryptography". I also turned it into a presentation for cf.Objective(). Now I am going to continue that and incorporate it into my security series. Repetition makes it stick, right?

So let's get started. And be sure to stick with me, cause somewhere in this post, I will have a contest.

[More]

Tomorrow night at the Twin Cities CFUG meeting, Kurt Wiersma and I will each be presenting one of our cf.Objective() presentations. I think we each have three presentations to give at cf.O(). This is your opportunity to see two of the six early (or at all if you are not going to the conference for some bizarre reason). :)

[More]