I wanted to put some of my work online for a long time now, but always put it off. But today beeing my last day at Hochschule Luzern, I finally can’t put it off anymore. So, here are three of the documents I wrote during my time here. (Sorry, all in German)

Authorization in Enterprise

In this project we are having a closer look at authentication and authorization technologies. We started with Suns Access Manager and later switched to OpenSSO to gather hands-on experience with some of the new technologies. This resulted in documents so far:

•  In the document “Federated Identity Management” we look closer at federation technology itself and try to explain what this term means. We also shade some light on SAML, SAML 2.0 and the Liberty Alliances ID-FF.
• In “Praktischer Einsatz von OpenSSO” we dive into OpenSSO. First, we have a look at its functionality and architecture. This rather theoretical part is followed by a step-by-step guide on how OpenSSO can be used, for example how an Apache Webserver can be protected using OpenSSO.

Security in Mobile Applications

This project was more or less done by the time I joined it. But there was still some time left to have a closer look at GSM and UMTS. This resulted in the document “GSM und UMTS – Eine Übersicht“, which tries to describe a bit of the history of the standards, how the networks are structured, what security features are implemented and how the communication protocols work.

In the course of consolidating our services on Enterprise Lab resources I had to move my SVN-Repos to a new host. Not a problem by itself, simply executing the following two commands usually does the trick:

# dump repos on old host
svnadmin dump /path/to/repo > repo.dump
# load dump into the new repo
svnadmin load /path/to/repo < repo.dump

However, I decided to use this opportunity to change the layout of the repos, namly to split the projects into separate repositories. This is also not to difficult and is very well documented in the subversion book. svndumpfilter can be used to filter a dump-stream based on paths. So, in order to get a dump only containing files in the folder AuthE and below, I’d use something like the following:

svndumpfilter include AuthE < repo.dump > authe_repo.dump

So far, so good. The new dump-file contains now only the folder AuthE and its content. It will still contain the top level folder AuthE, as it has been in repos.dump. In order to change this, e.g. move the content of AuthE to the Repos top level, we need to hack the dump file itself (also described in the subversion book). If you are not up to speed with regular expressions and don’t feel like hacking up your own script to edit the dump-file, you might like the perl script svn-dump-reloc posted on the svn-dev mailing list. So, to remove the AuthE folder in the authe_repo.dump, we would do the following (something like mv /AuthE/* ./):

./svn-dump-reloc AuthE/ / < authe_repo.dump > authe_reloc.dump

Now  we need to remove the directive that creates the AuthE path. It got emptied by the above command, but it’s should be about the only directive with an empty Node-path. In my repos, the passage in question looks as follows:

Node-path:
Node-action: add
Node-kind: dir
Prop-content-length: 10
Content-length: 10


PROPS-END

Remove this whole section. Pay attention to not use an editor which changes anything else on the dump file (like line ending). To test if all went OK you can create a repo, load the dump and then list the repositories root content.

# svnadmin create /home/isis/test_repo
# svnadmin load /home/isis/test_repo < authe_reloc.dump
# svn list file:///home/isis/test_repo
branches/
tags/
trunk/