Atul Kahate looks at Unicode charater encoding, the facts the myths, the need and the use. He talks of traditional encoding schemes like ASCII and later provides a comparison of the Unicode formats UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. The article lists the pros and cons of the various character encoding schemes and their common uses.
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The importance of security is often realized only after an application’s security is breached. One of the reasons why security is not enforced is it’s impact on application performance. Adding security makes my application slow is a very common excuse for not securing applications. While security features is a generic term, and can mean a number of things right from firewalls to identity management and more, in this article we will concentrate on the cryptographic implications. We will study the impact of using various kinds of cryptographic algorithms on performance.
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ODF versus OOXML has been a widely debated subject of late. What does this mean? Why does it matter to us? What is likely to happen? This article attempts to demystify these points.
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Identity management is one of the most interesting security problems to solve. How do we establish and then confirm the identity of a user or an application / system? Moreover, how do we inform anyone interested that the identity is established and that it can be safely trusted?
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The question of how best to perform user authentication is a puzzle that is quite tough to solve. While newer techniques keep emerging, the bread-and-butter user authentication technology of passwords will not go away very soon. Usage of passwords for authenticating users raises several concerns, such as how long the passwords should be, using what combinations of letters, digits, special symbols, etc; and also how long should passwords remain valid (i.e. how frequently they should expire), and so on.
The subject of threat models is quite interesting in the information security space. It talks about how we model the application so that only the authorized users are allowed an access to the system, while other unauthorized users are not. It can be very naive to think that thinking about possible threats and modeling solutions based on them is straightforward. Attacks often happen from the most unexpected people and places.
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