security – Brabeum

Customise the Laravel User Verification email

Starting with Laravel 5.7, the framework has updated the User and Auth models to include an email verification contract.

While this is very straightforward to initially configure, customising the content of the emails sent is not so obvious.

Configuring fail2ban on Debian – Part 2

In part 1 of this tutorial we looked at installing fail2ban and configuring some of the default jails. In this second part we shall look at some further jails, and configure filters and jails for applications not covered by the default installation.

Using a Yubikey for 2-factor authentication

For those of you who have not yet encountered a Yubikey, it is a physically small security key which empowers passwordless or 2-factor authentication in a number of different scenarios. They now support a huge number of protocols including One Time Passwords, NFC, FIDO2, U2F, Smart card, and OpenPGP.

Mine has been living on my keyring for several years now, and has proved invaluable for me accessing both my physical and electronic world.

Configuring fail2ban on Debian – Part 1

If you are administering a Linux server on a publicly accessible IP address then you have no-doubt already noticed your log files filling up with repeated failed login attempts against all common protocols. While it may be possible to protected services to some extent with firewalls, nothing is going to protect you from weak password policies and software vulnerabilities.

There is, however, a great Open Source product that can do away with some of the noise and frustrate the spammers; fail2ban.

UFW Cheat Sheet

Since the introduction by Ubuntu of UFW (Uncomplicated FireWall) back in 2008 it has been my tool of choice for simple firewall configuration. Whilst it may lack the depth and sophistication of an enterprise level product, its simplicity makes it straight-forward and quick to secure servers in simple use-cases.

Securing Apache for free with SSL and StartSSL

So you have a web-server and you want to serve content by SSL? If you have found you way to here, you have probably discovered that browsers such as Firefox do not make it easy to use self-signed certificates; large scary error messages do not inspire confidence in most users. But there is an easy answer – StartSSL.