An article from the DX maintainer about data recovery in Linux systems has recently been released in the german hakin9 print magazine 01/2009, covering file-system reconstruction, forensic imaging, string-analysis, file-carving, slack observation and more.
The direct successor to USBAuth (pam_usbauth) is called pam_usbng and represents a complete rewrite with many enhancements. It's much easier to get the module up and running, and offers new nice features. You may have a look to the project page here
As MySQL versions 4.1, 4.2 and early builds of 5.0 are vulnerable to a simple but devastating bug in the source code of the database server for which I couldn't find any exploit, here's a short description how to code it on your own.
The leader of the Backend Security Project of OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), Carlo Pelliccioni, asked me for collaboration as he took a look into the Delta Xi MySQL hardening paper.
Cryptographic routines and algorithms often rely on randomness, which is an essential fundament, especially in key-generation applications. This paper discusses how pseudo and real random numbers may be generated and how threatening unconcerness due to lack of entropy may seriously risk security. In addition, a brief overview of well-known and massively-used RNGs like Linux /dev/random are presented.
You may download the paper, as well as the presentation slides.
Most keylogging solutions deserve to be called as root-user; Userspace-Loggers as well as Kernelspace-Loggers. This simple piece of code shows you how you can use X11 to get a nice workaround for keylogging X-sessions.
An article about secure authentication systems has recently been released in the hakin9 print magazine, also covering USBAuth, which has been renewed and now also supports additional PIN-based hashed authentication for even more security.
Due to contract issues, Delta Xi unfortunately had a downtime for about 6 days. These problems affected not only the HTTP/S service, but also SVN and the USBAuth space. Several updates are to be announced. Thanks to ph030, who's ideas about using USBAuth with non-usb memory devices (e.g. SD), some bug tracking and a Gentoo ebuild will flow into the main code within the next 3-4 weeks.
The paper according to the DX article of symmetric mail cryptography is finally done. You may download the (German) paper here.
Security policies commonly don't fit the laziness of users and system administrators. You shouldn't be logged in as root directly, you shouldn't use short and unsafe passwords, and so on.
pam_usbauth.so let's you authenticate yourself on your system, passwordless with just having something like a "crypto USB device" plugged in - without additional uncommon hardware.
Syslogd is the friend of all administrators. No serious admin would miss taking a look in /var/log/* consistantly. Reading and working out log files is a very time consuming process, and even more complicated when administrating multiple server boxes.
This mini-howto shows you how to centralize your logs.
One and a half decades before, firewalls have had an exciting hype towards the whole Internet community. A few years later, numberous companies tried to get customers by releasing (partitally really obscure) security systems by calling them "Intrusion detection", then, again a few years later, "Intrusion prevention" and nowadays also prevention is not enough, but the software is called "Intrusion Reaction".
However, something like a host-based intrusion detection system can be established via a small FreeBSD tool called Mtree.