Howto

Cossack Labs has recently joined the DigitalOcean Marketplace family following our mission to make high-end security tools available to the general developer audience in a convenient fashion. Acra encryption suite is one of the first data security and encryption tools on DigitalOcean Marketplace and it is now available as 1-Click App running in DigitalOcean Droplet . Acra provides selective encryption, multi-layered access control, SQL firewall (SQL injection prevention), database leakage prevention, and intrusion detection capabilities as server deployed in your infrastructure (on prem or in cloud).

Distributed tracing is incredibly helpful during the integration and optimisation of microservice-rich software. Before implementing tracing as a publicly available feature in the latest version of Acra, we did a small research to catch up with current industry standards in tracing protocols and tools. In this article, we’ve decided to explain, why tracing is a very useful thing and how you can benefit from using it in your projects.

Need for Docker image reducing To provide convenient delivery and faster deployment of our tools, just like everybody else − we use Docker. This article describes our experience of using containers for distribution of our product Acra (database encryption suite) and focuses on the method we used to reduce the size of Docker images approximately by 62-64 times. It’s not like we’ve made a revolutionary discovery, but as developers, we found it interesting to trace the steps from the moment of packaging a product into a container to trimming it down to a small Docker image.

Key management in security system Frequently overlooked, much less hyped than quantum computers breaking trapdoor functions, managing keys is actually the most important part of building a security system. Secret keys, public-private key pairs, passwords and other factors of authentication are the control vessels within security system. In this article, we will go through basic key management concepts, explain some important ideas for next articles and provide some practical advice you can start implementing within your application tomorrow.

This article was revisited and updated in August 2018. In modern client-server applications, most of the sensitive data is stored (and consequently leaked) on the backend. At Cossack Labs, we’re working on novel techniques to protect the data within modern infrastructures. We talk to engineers across industries about these techniques quite a lot too. However, it is still not uncommon to see infrastructures without even the basic classic database defence patterns.

Why do I even need to choose? Warning: This article borrows a lot from our original Choose your iOS Crypto publication, so if you've read that one, feel free to skip ahead to the libraries and ending notes about the actual Android specificities. When building your next app, you might realise that you need to encrypt the data. There are two main reasons for that: transmitting sensitive data to the server and back

Why do I even need to choose? When building your next app, you might realize that you need to encrypt the data. There are two main reasons for that: The need to transmit sensitive data to server and back; The need to store sensitive data. Even though there are multiple tools for doing just that, not all of those tools are equal. By just taking some random algorithm from CommonCrypto and using StackOverflow example to implement it, you'll fail.

Intro While developing components of our products, we love to explore use cases and usability through creating real-world test stands.  0fc is a side-product of WebThemis research: while doing some protocol design for front-end clients with WebThemis services, we wanted to try it in a real-world situation. We've set ourselves a novel idea: end-to-end encrypted webchat, inclined towards client anonymity, giving zero trust to the server, built only with typical Themis primitives.

Intro While building WebThemis, we've encountered the need to build LibreSSL for PNaCl as a source of cryptographic primitives. The problem? LibreSSL has huge codebase with a lot of complicated code, that won't build on new platform out of the box. Solution? Strip all we can and make the rest work. Having gone “let’s do a quick hack to build Libre” barbaric way for PoC version of WebThemis, we would like to share our experience for the aspiring PNaCl developers to benefit.

Intro Native Client (NaCl) allows browser applications to launch a native low-level code in an isolated environment. Thanks to this, some code, performance code parts can be rewritten in C or C++ easily. Until recent time, NaCl could work on x86-compatible systems only, yet supporting ARM platform becomes very important, because a huge variety of devices (especially the newest Chrome OS laptops), are built on ARM architecture. All you need to compile the code for ARM is located in the latest Native Client SDK.

Introduction Imagine you'd like to build your own chat server, which allows clients to exchange messages safely. You have a simple infrastructure consisting of a server written in Ruby and clients for iOS and Android. This is exactly what the famous Mobile websocket example provides. We have modified it to illustrate how simple it is to add security features using Themis. In this tutorial, we'll try to preserve as much of it's simplicity and architecture as possible, but add cryptographic protection.