Thursday, March 23, 2006

Security By Obscurity

by damonp on March 23, 2006

in Security

Good security consists of multiple layers of procedures and applications, all with the goal of keeping unauthorized users out and ensuring properly authorized users have access to only the things they should. With public internet servers and web applications this can mean things such as:

  • Ensuring users create at least moderately secure passwords
  • Instituting mandatory password changes on a monthly or quarterly schedule
  • Regular security audits
  • Firewall and firewall maintenance

Another layer not usually thought of is obscurity. If they can’t find it, they can’t exploit it. That being said, obscurity by itself isn’t very secure. It only takes one malicious user to find what has been hidden and all hell breaks loose. Multiple layers of security build upon each other more than just through addition. They add orders of magnitude more security to the system as a whole.

Most web applications support changing the default install directories. To keep prying eyes out of your data, move PHPMyAdmin into a directory with a random name. Move the admin directory for an applications like, ZenCart. If you are use these admin URLs frequently, the URL will be saved in the history of your browser and always accessible. If not a simple bookmark can help you remember.

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Allele

by damonp on March 23, 2006

in Dictionary

Television crime shows throw this word around all the time. From the context, you can guess the general meaning. I took a closer look and found this from Wikipedia:

An allele is any one of a number of viable DNA codings of the same gene (sometimes the term refers to a non-gene sequence) occupying a given locus (position) on a chromosome. An individual’s genotype for that gene will be the set of alleles it happens to possess. In an organism which has two copies of each of its chromosomes (a diploid organism), two alleles make up the individual’s genotype.

An example is the gene for blossom color in many species of flower — a single gene controls the color of the petals, but there may be several different versions of the gene. One version might result in red petals, while another might result in white petals. The color of an individual flower will depend on which two alleles it possesses for this color gene, and how the two interact.

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