Tag: PKI

Manage Passwords in Linux Ecosystem with Pass Utility

Mohit GoyalLeave a comment

Password based authentications are very common. However storing and securing passwords is an hassle. There are already too many offline and online only services, which does this work for you. Others are more feature-rich and offer lot of other features. If you work in an offline (or air-gap, disconnected from internet, etc) environment, you can use a simple open source utility called pass. It can be used to store each password as a separate file with gpg encryption. It is CLI based, but there are GUI extensions available and has a lot of support in the community.

Also with git, you can choose to sync the encrypted passwords with internal source repos as well, so that you can get all benefits of gitops as well.

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Store the app secrets in Azure Key Vault and use during Azure Pipelines

Mohit Goyal5 Comments

You can easily store your environment related secrets in the Azure Pipelines releases as variables and mark them as secrets which will encrypt and hide them. So anyone having access to the release definition would be not able to view them. Most of the times, it suffices as once set, they become encrypted and can not be viewed in text form.

However, sometimes it may happen that the person who keeps the secret would not be the same person as who is creating the release definition. Think of that as a way of segregating the responsibilities between the two. Also, it may be possible that the person who has provisioned the environment is not comfortable to share the secrets with anyone in plain text. After all, the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone about it. This is where the Azure Key Vault fits in very nicely. It can be used to store and transfer the secrets/certificates needed for your environment in a secure way.
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Use SSL Certificates for Dotnet Core Application in Docker Containers

Mohit Goyal3 Comments

Using SSL to secure incoming and outgoing traffic from your server is always recommended. When you are developing locally or testing on a server, whether it is Windows or Macintosh or some distribution of Linux like CentOS, fedora, Ubuntu etc, its easy to put the certificate in one of the local directories and then ask server to use the same. However this becomes a little bit different if you are using Containers. Since Docker is the most popular container technology, it has become almost synonymous with containers. When using containers, you can many choices:
1) Map a local volume containing certificate files to the container and then refer to it from inside container
2) Copy certificate directly inside Container during image build process and then refer to it Read More »

Use OpenSSL to work with SSL Certificates, CSR and Private Keys

Mohit Goyal1 Comment

OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit on the Linux that can be used for a large variety of tasks related to Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. It is also a general purpose cryptography library. It is licensed under an Apache-style license, which basically means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes subject to some simple license conditions.

It is already installed out of the box on the most linux distributions or available in the trusted package repositories. OpenSSL has been kind of standard in the open source domain to work with SSL and TLS protocols. If for some reason, it is not already installed, you can install it by using your distribution specific commands.

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