Using SmartCardHsm with GnuPG

May 2, 2020 4 minute read

When you want to store your GnuPG private key(s) on a smartcard, you have a few options like the Yubikey, NitroKey GPG compatible cards, or the OpenPGP. The advantage of these cards is that they support GnuPG directly. The disadvantage is that they can only store 1 or a few keys.

Another option is SmartCardHSM, NitroKey HSM is based on SmartCardHsm and should be compatible. The newer versions support 4k RSA encryption keys and can store up 19 RSA 4k keys. The older version is limited to 2k RSA keys. I still have the older version. The advantage is that you can store multiple keys on the card. To use it for GPG encryption you’ll need to set up a gpg-agent with gnupg-pkcs11-scd.

Setup a certificate authority with SmartCardHSM

April 29, 2020 13 minute read

In this blog post, we will set up a CA authority with SmartCardHSM.

When you to create internal certificate authority for internal services it’s important to protect the private key. When somebody with bad intentions gets access to the private key(s) of the signing certificate authorities, it can be used to issue new certificates. This would enable the man in the middle attacks.

Lookat 2.0.1 released

April 23, 2020 less than 1 minute read

“lookat” (or “bekijk” in Dutch) is a program to view text files and manual pages. It is designed to be more user-friendly than more conventional text viewers such as less. And supports colored manpages.

Lookat 2.0.1 is the latest stable release of Lookat/Bekijk.

ChangeLog

• BUGFIX: corrected screen refresh code. To handle non-utf8 terminals correctly.
• BUGFIX: ensure that menus are initialized before using them.
• BUGFIX: corrected type menu handling.
• BUGFIX: failed to open type enabled extentions from the commandline.

Use unbound as an DNS-over-TLS resolver and authoritative dns server

March 22, 2020 2 minute read

In previous blog posts, I described howto setup stubby as an DNS-over-TLS resolver. I used stubby on my laptop(s) and unbound on my internal network.

But I’m migrating away from stubby in favour of unbound.

Unbound is a popular DNS resolver, it’s less known that you can also use it as an authoritative DNS server.

I created a docker container that can serve both purposes, although you can use the same logic without docker.

It’s available at https://github.com/stafwag/docker-stafwag-unbound.

CGIpaf at GNU Savannah

March 18, 2020 less than 1 minute read

The CGIpaf project has a new home at GNU savannah: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/cgipaf/

The source code was - and is still also hosted - on GitHub.

There are a few reasons for the move;

• I was looking for an easy way to store binary releases. Binary releases aren’t supported by GitHub. There might be a solution for this at GitLab but scp to upload a release is more convenient.
• GitHub is becoming too dominant.
• I prefer a solution that is based on Free Software.
• I was already using GNU savannah for another project lookat.

Have fun