Make a little adjustment for the new Copyright Law

The Canadian Copyright bill was passed yesterday, a bill that demands a little adjustment to our day to day life. Till now, no one cared who is using our internet connection or what are the files being downloaded or uploaded using it. No one cared of your unscrambled satellite videos from across the border. However that’s all changing even though you may not want it that way. I guess no one can withstand the pressure of the “big guys” for too long.

Protecting Clear Text Password

Passwords are the basic type of authentication in a system. They are easy to implement and also easy to attack. However, there are situations where you need to use a password to protect access to a resource. Its fine if an end user of system is providing the password directly to the system. Sometimes you need to store the password in a configuration file of a system. That’s where the dilemma starts. You have a scheduled SFTP process that needs a password to start. Do you keep the password in clear text or do you encrypt it? If you encrypt it, then how do you protect the key to encrypt and decrypt the password?

EDW Security Considerations

An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), according to California State University, is a collection of data that can be defined and shared across the whole enterprise along the lines of common dimensions to be used for analysis. While you are in the designing phase of an EDW, there are certain security and related functional requirements that needs to be considered.