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White Paper - There's an App for That, But is it Secure?

"There's an App for That, But is it Secure?"

This Tech Dossier will outline proven best practices to mitigate risk and embrace mobility without trepidation.

Security has eroded over the past decade as companies strive to create applications for multiple platforms by farming design and development out to subcontractors. This trend has strained the processes and governance put in place to ensure application security.

Download your free copy of "There's an App for That, But is it Secure?" -- here

Display Dialog boxes from shell scripts - Whiptail

whiptail is a lightweight replacement for dialog, to provide dialog boxes for shell scripts. It is built on the newt windowing library rather than the ncurses library, allowing it to be smaller in embedded environments such as installers, rescue disks, etc.

Currently, these types of dialog boxes are implemented:
yes/no box, menu box, input box, message box, text box, info box, checklist box, radiolist box gauge box, and password box.

whiptail is designed to be drop-in compatible with dialog, but has less features: some dialog boxes are not implemented, such as tailbox, timebox, calendarbox, etc.

Whiptail Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install whiptail:

sudo apt-get install whiptail

Securely erase files and partition from magnetic media - Wipe

Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what many people wouldlike to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk; wipe repeatedly overwrites special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access. In normal mode, 34 patterns are used (of which 8 are random). These patterns were recommended in an article from Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz) entitled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". A quick mode allows you to use only 4 passes with random patterns, which is of course much less secure.

Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partitions.

Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your disk).

Convert webpages (HTML) to PDF using webkit - wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf is a command line utility that can be used to convert a webpage / html to PDF.

Wkhtmltopdf Features:
* Convert web pages into PDF documents using webkit
* Adding headers and footers (static version only)
* TOC generation (static version only)
* Batch mode conversions
* (Linux) No longer requires an XServer to be running (however the X11 client libs must be installed)

Wkhtmltopdf Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to intall Wkhtmltopdf:

sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf Usage:
Wkhtmltopdf is command line utility, the following lists some usages for wkhtmltopdf
To convert a remote HTML file to PDF:

wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com google.pdf

To convert a local HTML file to PDF:

wkhtmltopdf my.html my.pdf

You can also convert to PS files if you like:

wkhtmltopdf my.html my.ps

FLV Metadata Injector for FLV files - Yamdi

yamdi stands for Yet Another MetaData Injector and is a metadata injector for FLV files. It adds the onMetaData event to your FLV files. yamdi should run under *BSD, Linux and Windows and is published under the BSD license.

Yamdi features:
* Large file support
* H.264 support
* onMetaData, onLastSecond, onLastKeyframe events
* low memory footprint
* XML metadata output
* Binaries for Win32 and Win64 are available