Reinstalling Openldap in CZ.NIC

At the beginning of the year, a need arose to reinstall the LDAP, which had been running in CZ.NIC on an older OS, and I figured I did not want to miss such an interesting “challenge”. And I was very excited about it until I realized that the same server was, as a “bonus”, probably, running Freeradius and Radsecproxy with a connection to Eduroam. Of course, this was also to be rewritten as the syntax between the versions Freeradius v2 and v3 had changed a little bit. Only then I understood and admired the patience of people who set these things in CZ.NIC before me and I know that they have “enjoyed” this quite a lot. But this is a topic for another day, as this blog post should be about installing LDAP. I emphasize that this article discusses only basic LDAP settings.

Open Nettest app has measured Internet speed as far as in French Polynesia

To those who want to test their Internet connection speed, there are several options available in the app store. An application for measuring high-speed Internet connection called Open Nettest was developed as part of the international project Open Crowdsourcing Data related to the Quality of Service of High-Speed Internet (MoQoS). Using this application, you can test the speed of connection provided by your mobile operator or the speed of connection through a wireless network.

Transition to elliptic curves in the CZ domain

The history of introducing the DNSSEC technology in the CZ domain goes back more than a decade, and there have been several important changes during its course. For example, let’s look at the year 2010, which was literally packed with events related to the introduction of DNSSEC. First of all, the root zone was signed in July and right afterwards, the first KSK rotation with the change of algorithm among the top-level domains took place in the CZ domain in August. After eight years, we are going to repeat this “combo”, only in reverse order. There is a delayed first rotation of the root zone KSK (without altering the algorithm) scheduled in October. And in June we will perform the already announced KSK key rotation in the CZ domain, again with the change of the algorithm. This time, however, we will use the ECDSA algorithm based on elliptic curves — as the first top-level domain administrator.

For our children to continue using the Internet

The time before the GDPR enters into force is relentlessly ticking away. Do not worry, in this post I am neither going to paint scary pictures of what companies will have to face, nor make a list of what you should forget about when this law is enacted; I will “just” focus on the processing of personal data of children, namely the Article 8 that regulates the conditions for granting consent with processing of the child’s personal data in connection with information society services.

Your Own Certification Authority in a Letsencrypt Style

Have you ever thought of automating the certificate issuing in your organization’s internal certification authority? How about using the same procedure as in Let’s Encrypt and the ACME protocol, while enjoying all the benefits ACME has to offer? The possible solution is to use Boulder. I will now try to break down for you the Boulder’s installation process and the pitfalls that I encountered during the setup.

Looking back at the Cybercompetition finale

A golden opportunity: the bank we’re about to rob is moving to new premises today. To our luck, they’re also testing alarms until 4 PM, so it won’t be suspicious if we accidentally set one off. There is an open window on the first floor protected by a single sensor. Our inside man among the staff has placed an IP camera into the sensor cabinet, so we can see if the sensor we are trying to break has the ‘status OK’ or the alarm is screaming. The IP camera is streaming to YouTube — alas with a delay. The problem is that the sensor communicates via radio waves: every 15 to 30 seconds the diode beeps and the device sends a signal. We’re listening, trying to imitate it, and when we’re sure, we’re gonna shut down the sensor and turn on our little imitation that we built. What is left is just to arrange the tin foil between the antennas, like this… the sensor alarm’s blaring! We are holding our ears and will try again in half a minute.

IETF 99 in numbers

Last week, thanks to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) conference, Prague became the center of the Internet community. It was for the fourth time that the Czech Republic was given the honor to host this important meeting where RFC (Request for Comments) standards are created: Prague hosted it in March 2007 (68th IETF), 2011 (80th IETF) and July 2015 (93th IETF), with our Association having taken part in organizing the last three meetings.

Looking back at the first round of the cyber competition

The ongoing first nationwide competition in cyber security attracted not only students of technical fields, but also many gymnasium students. The first round of the competition was attended by 1,067 participants from 162 schools of various specialization from across the country. The only restriction was the age (15-18 years), in order that the most successful competitors be qualified for the European Cyber Security Challenge. Most students came from the Prague, South Moravia, Pardubice and Vysočina regions.