I have been planning on making a technical blog for a long time. I gave it a couple of tries before but never got it finished. Now, I made the final stretch and have one up. From the title, you might have seen the technologies used, and you might ask, “Why Jekyll?” The reason is that static websites are small, cheap, and fast. I am...
Last year, my internal M.2 SSD drive stopped working. I had experienced disconnection problems over the last 2 years; however, last year, it just refused to turn on. It was also encrypted with BitLocker. I took it to a repair shop that claimed they could perform data recovery. However, after waiting for a couple of days, they informed me that...
If you have followed my Getting a blog running with Jekyll, GitHub Actions, AWS S3, and CloudFront post, among other things you will see an issue where if you manually go to the 404.html page, CloudFront will happily serve you the 404.html page with 200 OK status code. This not only is wrong, but also hurts SEO. I don’t care much about SEO...
I am scared of using AWS. In AWS, you can’t easily put a hard cap on the money that you will spend, meaning if you are the target of a DDoS attack or if something goes wrong, you might be overcharged massively. For me, this means that if my CloudFront distributions are under a DDoS attack, I might get a budget notification in my email, but...
In this post I will try to explain how electronic passports work, how to read files from them and how to verify the authenticity of the chips inside them. Hopefully it will provide an entry point for those who have not tinkered with smart cards in the past.
In the second part of this post I will try to give code examples for some basic functionality in eMRTDs. I will add code snippets for each of the sections. The code is mostly a port of my other project eMRTD_face_access from Python to Rust (emrtd crate). It came to life because I was interested in a rewrite of the project in Golang to take it...