Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/04
Voor mijn link archief als ik er aan toe kom om ook een PQC web-site in te richten: [Wayback/Archive] Volledig Post-Quantum Cryptografie website, een mooi artikel van [Wayback/Archive] Harld (@harld@masto.ai) – Mastodon die sommigen kennen van een of meer van deze sites:
Via
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apache2, Certificates, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, PKI, Power User, PQC, Public Key Cryptography, Security, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/10/29
A week ago, it seems like an eternity in vulnerability land, eMudhra popularised quoting the number four:
It felt like the Diginotar debacle, but 15 years later and voluntarily. And like I wrote yesterday, another (partially – hello “O=eMudhra BV, C=NL” next to “O=eMudhra Inc, C=US”) Dutch company involved. Hopefully that’s not a prediction for the future.
Given their laughably weak keys and their laughably excuse, lots of jokes appeared.
Apart from “there is always an XKCD” (I wish [Wayback/Archive] Relevant XKCD Search still functioned, but luckily [Wayback/Archive] Relevant XKCD does, hello [Wayback/Archive] Relevant XKCD=random), Randall Munroe also created aĀ new one, plus one of the XCKD memes was re-used, so here are three, plus a whole lot of other jokes that quickly appeared:
Posted in Certificates, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/10/28
These didn’t take long for [Wayback/Archive] Mitmproxy 12.3: eMudhra Edition to appear with these commits:
It is by [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – mitmproxy/mitmproxy: An interactive TLS-capable intercepting HTTP proxy for penetration testers and software developers. Ā· GitHub whichĀ I mentioned a few times before on my blogĀ¹, so now is the time introduce the mitmproxy category.
Oh BTW: like Diginotar, eMudhra lists about half of the affected certificates as coming from the Netherlands. See the O=eMudhra BV, C=NL bits at the [Wayback/Archive] eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise.
I won’t go into much detail as why it is so easy to generate these eMudhra certificates, as a much better job already has been done at [Wayback/Archive] Why Were eMudhra’s CA Keys Easy to Guess? Ā· Metaheuristic
Posted in Certificates, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, JavaScript/ECMAScript, mitmproxy, Power User, Python, Scripting, Security, Software Development, TypeScript | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/01
Cool, since I switched to Let’s Encrypt a long while ago, I missed that various tools now require TLS expiration be no longer than 398 days away (and preferably even 397 days).
So I also missed the reason for that specific number of days. [Wayback/Archive] ssl – Why was 398 days chosen for TLS expiration? – Stack Overflow (thanksĀ [Wayback/Archive] stevendesu and [Wayback/Archive] user10063)
answers it:
366+31+1 = 398 days
It equals one leap year + one month + “a little room to handle the messiness of dates.”
then posts a lot of quotes from references to the history on how that reason came to be. I have archived and listed the links below.
Most of the discussion was during a very hectic time in life: after a single sided bad accident my mentally retarded brother was in and assisting him during his recovery period, I developed cancer and had extensive treatments against it. All the more reason for missing all this:
Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, TCP, TLS | Tagged: 138, 195 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/30
Now that I got pointed to this twice (see “Via” below), I need to get one so I can play with it: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – i-am-shodan/USBArmyKnife: USB Army Knife ā the ultimate close access tool for penetration testers and red teamers.
Via:
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Blue team, Bluetooth, Development, Encryption, ESP32, Hardware, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Home Audio/Video, HTTPS/TLS security, Infosec (Information Security), Network-and-equipment, Power User, Red team, Software Development, WiFi, Wireshark | Tagged: USBArmyKnife | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/07
On my research list [Wayback/Archive] html – What can cause Chrome to give an net::ERR_FAILED on cached content against a server on localhost? – Stack Overflow
The reason what that back then this would fail (but worked in Firefox and Safari, and because I was in a hurry I didn’t research further): [Wayback/Archive] https://www.office.com/
This site canāt be reached
The webpage at https://www.office.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_FAILED
Thanks [Wayback/Archive] Mason Wheeler and [Wayback/Archive] Joel Davey.
Details:
Posted in Chrome, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Power User, Security, TCP, TLS, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/02
Every now and then I want to check how a URL redirect, for instance when checking out why a domain failed loading in browsers a while ago because of certificate problems:
The thing was that back then, the site officially did not have a security certificate, but somehow the provider had installed a self-signed one. Most web-browsers then auto-redirect from http to https. Luckily the archival sites can archive without redirecting:
When querying [Wayback/Archive] redirect check – Google Search, you get quite some results. These are the ones I use most in descending order of preference and why they are at that position:
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, archive.is / archive.today, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, ISP, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, WayBack machine, Web Development, wget, xs4all | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/26
Not just for IIS, but for hardening any Windows system including ones running http.sys (like ADFS): [Wayback/Archive] Nartac Software – IIS Crypto
Posted in .NET, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, HTTPS/TLS security, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/19
I while ago, I bumped intoĀ [Wayback/Archive] crt.sh | Certificate Search that allows searching for (the history of) TLS certificates.
One example of what it returns is [Wayback/Archive] crt.sh | wiert.me (for my blog domain and subdomains).
The basic mechanism of crt.sh is to query various Certificate Transparency logs and Certificate revocation list, terms I vaguely knew, but never fully realised the vast usefulness of (including questions likeĀ [Wayback/Archive] How does crt.sh becomes aware of certificates that are in no CT logs?).
The cool thing is that most (everything?) of it is open source in the various repositories atĀ [Wayback/Archive] Github: crt.sh.
There is also an advanced search page [Wayback/Archive] crt.sh | Certificate Search (a=1) with many more options (including linting) I really want to try later plus a bunch of background links (including the support forum at) of which some *.crt.sh returned a http 502 while writing this blog post. Will try later to see if they have started working again:
Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, TCP, TLS | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/24
Quite a while ago [Wayback/Archive] string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow asked by [Wayback/Archive] User Jeff was answered by [Wayback/Archive] Andreas Rejbrand:
The simplest approach is
function GetAlphaSubstr(const Str: string): string; const ALPHA_CHARS = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z']; var ActualLength: integer; i: Integer; begin SetLength(result, length(Str)); ActualLength := 0; for i := 1 to length(Str) do if Str[i] in ALPHA_CHARS then begin inc(ActualLength); result[ActualLength] := Str[i]; end; SetLength(Result, ActualLength); end;but this will only consider English letters as “alphabetical characters”. It will not even consider the extremely important Swedish letters Ć , Ć, and Ć as “alphabetical characters”!
Slightly more sophisticated is
function GetAlphaSubstr2(const Str: string): string; var ActualLength: integer; i: Integer; begin SetLength(result, length(Str)); ActualLength := 0; for i := 1 to length(Str) do if Character.IsLetter(Str[i]) then begin inc(ActualLength); result[ActualLength] := Str[i]; end; SetLength(Result, ActualLength); end;
Back in 2011 I added a comment that for more than a decade would redirect to the most current documentation on the IsLetter method:
+1 for usingĀ
IsLetterwhich checks the Unicode definition for being a letter or not [Wayback] docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
Back then, Delphi X2 was current, so it would redirect
After a long outage in 2022 (seeĀ The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.) only the Alexandria help was restored.
This killed the above redirect.
Luckily [Wayback/Archive] George BirbilisĀ noticed that and commented this:
@JeroenWiertPluimers the correct link now is:Ā docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/ā¦
In order to refer to the most recent Delphi version, now you have to use [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter.
This redirects:
The above breaks the help integration from older Delphi products which is bad. It is also bad because it makes it harder to port legacy Delphi code to more modern Delphi versions.
Hopefully the above gives you a bit insight how the docwiki help system was designed and what is left of that design.
–jeroen
Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Encryption, Event, HTML, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
