Today I my Yubikey arrived in the mail, which is a hardware token (what you have) used for multi-factor authentication. It is by default tied into their cloud web authentication service, allowing you to authenticate a device via a OTP over simple RESTful APIs. They have a number of libraries, and plugins, one of which is for WordPress, allowing for two-factor authentication to login to the blog.

For those of you who are extra paranoid, they also provide libraries to parse the OTP responses to host your own validation server, and you can generate your own keys to store on the device (it stores up to 2). It can be configured to generate driver-less (well, HID keyboard) Yubico OTP, static passwords (for long, passwords), HMAC-SHA1 responses.

I’ve decided to use the HMAC-SHA1 challenge-response configuration on the second slot for a guarded data store, where the data is encrypted by the HMAC response to a given challenge, and on each decryption, re-encrypted with a a different challenge-response pair. This will allow for the Yubikey to enable network-less protections. From there I’d like to extend that to the existing Linux FDE Yubikey solution. I certainly will be standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of my contributions, but I hope they will be well received.

Peace and chow,

Jacob

Me ready to ride!

As the weather starts to warm up, and the sun begins to stay above the horizon for longer into the evening, I’ve been biking more and more. My new Trek Madone 3.1 and I are going to be busy this summer, with two charity rides (click the links to sponsor me), the 100mi Tour de Cure and the 150mi Bike for MS.
Also this summer I’m doing the Black Fly Challenge, a 40mi mountain bike race in the ADK park.

Happy riding!

During my thesis research, I came across a very useful library for machine learning and anomaly detection: libAnomaly. While it hasn’t been updated in years, the papers published (see site for list) are of interest to me. When I attempted to compile the library to play around with, the build failed due to GCC4 being more strict than previous versions, I found a number of other posts from people trying to build the library with similar problems, so I thought I’d fix the errors (there are still plenty of warnings) and upload it so others wouldn’t have to duplicate the effort. You can download the source from here.

Peace and chow,

Jacob

Happy New Year!

I am going to interrupt my long hiatus of posting by a few pictures from my trip out to the Sierras in California.I’ve been staying in near the Kirkwood ski resort both working on building my quads of steel tele-mark skiing and hiking up the countless peaks in the area. The weather here has been unseasonably warm, with little to no snow outside of what’s man-made (which is a pity for skiing), but hiking in a tee-shirt in the crisp air and bright sun is unbeatable.

Peace and chow,

Jacob

A few hours after my last post, I was 25m below the ocean, drifting along above a reef filled with tropical fish, cuddlefish and a moray eel. After my dive I headed back to meet up with Greg and we returned to a beachfront hut, munching Indonesian food in the shade. At 3:45 we boarded a small and tippy boat for Gili Menos the least populated of the three Gilis. With our packs and hammock tents, we began hiking around the island, looking for a perfect spot to set up camp. We found our spot just as the sun was about to set, and hung our hammocks, then watched the sun set, enjoying the cool ocean breeze.
As soon as we settled in to our hanging beds, that breeze ceased, leaving us hot and mostly sleepless for the night, waking up heat exhausted and feeling weak. A short walk and boat back to the largest Gili (gili means island) we planned our return to civilization and scarfed down a quick breakfast. Once on our fast boat, we could tell we were in for a ride, with the boat pounding through big waves. The rocking added to our already sick misery and we dreamed of solid land. Once back in Pandang Bay, we checked into a backpackers hostel and slept and rehydrated, starting to feel better as time went by.
From here our time is starting to end, so a return to Sanur to enjoy the beach and sun before our return to NY.

Peace and chow,
Jacob