Yannblog

The personal website of Ian Littman

Archive for May, 2010

A couple of cool VPS tips

May 30

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

So I’m transferring VPS hosts, as of less than an hour ago. Not that there was anything to transfer (I store important stuff on local systems, backed up to BackBlaze, and host this blog and my other personal stuff on MDDHosting) but I’ll be ending my stint at Virpus Networks with the end of my billing cycle. Not that they’re bad or anything, but with my new provider, QuickWeb, I’ll be utilizing what’s arguably the world’s best data center network (SoftLayer) and spending less money while I’m at it ($25 every three months instead of $12 every month).

The server also seems to be more snappy; not sure whether it’s because the Virpus server is packing more VPSes onto a machine stocked with four dual-core Pentium 4 based Xeon chips (at 3 GHz) versus the QuickWeb Xeon 3220 VPS count or what, but the QuickWeb server feels…well…quicker. Sure, I’ll be limited to 1TB of transfer (yeah I know, *limited*) per month (versus 1500GB for $7 or 3000GB for $12 at Virpus) but that 1TB can be transferred over a fire hose of a connection: a gigabit port, to be exact. Needless to say, if I need to deliver some files quickly to a bunch of folks they’re going on this server.

But back to the title of this post…here are some quick VPS-related tips…key words will be linked…eventually… Read the rest of this entry »

MASC: Miniature/Modifiable Asymmetric-Symmetric Cryptosystem

May 8

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

I just finished writing my final report for Intro to Modern Cryptography. The topic: a light, home-brewed, C++, library-asisted OpenPGP equivalent for encrypting files. The basic concept is as follows for OpenPGP:

  1. Symmetric encryption (AES etc.) is fast but you have to get the key from point A to point B securely
  2. Asymmetric encryption (RSA etc.) negates the key sharing requirement but is slow
  3. Asymmetrically encrypt a symmetric “session” key, then use the session key to encrypt the file/message you’re trying to send and you get the best of both worlds!

So I made a command line utility, using the Chilkat Visual C++ library set, that did the above for file encryption, with automatic signing built in so the recipient knows who sent the file. The application is rather basic, but it works very well (and pretty quickly for encryption/decryption…my IdeaPad took about seven seconds each to encrypt and decrypt a 100MB file) and is easy to dissect for anyone who wants to do that sort of thing.

For more information, download the package below Read the rest of this entry »

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