Dog Training for Network Admins: Managing POODLE - CVE-2014-3566

CVE-2014-3566 relates to a flaw found in handling of padded bytes in SSL3.0 when using CBC mode for the encryption[3]. The flaw may be exploited topermit a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. The attacker may be able todecrypt a selected byte of a cipher text in a limited number (256) ofattempts, by repeatedly requesting the victim to send the same data overmultiple SSLv3 connections. The vulnerability exists in the protocol itself and not a specificimplementation of the protocol e.

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Connecting to OpenVPN from a Mac using Tunnelblink

To connect to an OpenVPN server you need an appropriate OpenVPN clientinstalled to establish the SSL link. For Apple Mac OS X systems,TunnelBlick (http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/) is a good graphicaluser interface. At the time of this blog the current latest stableversion of TunnelBlick available was 3.2.7. These instructions wereexecuted on an Apple iMac running Mac OS X 10.7.4. As with all otherposts on this blog, the purpose of this post is not to provide atutorial, but instead to documents the steps taken, for my ownbenefit.

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Change Apple Mac OS X Software Update Service (SUS) address

Apple IU Software Update service allows uses to keep their Mac OS Xmachines updated with the latest software updates and security patched.In some controlled environments, the update servers are specified in theuser profile. Sometimes there may be delays in the server updates, orproblems with the local update server and users may desire to connect toApple’s services directly. Here’s are some instructions that users mayfind useful.

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APAcite on Mac OS X with texlive

While compiling a LaTeX document, a blank template of my PhD thesis tobe exact, when I got the following error “! LaTeX Error: File`apacite.sty’ not found.” Again a quick search for Mac ports indicatedthat the texlive-bibtex-extra package was required. It was quicklyinstalled using; sudo port install texlive-bibtex-extra Subsequent compile yielded more errors, this time it was “! Undefinedcontrol sequence. \abstract”. This was solved using thetexlive-latex-extra package, installed using;

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