Eric Ripa eripa

My OS X “VPN only” Setup For #30C3

You should never let passwords or private data be transmitted over an untrusted network (your neighbor’s, the one at Starbucks or the company) anyway, but on a hacker congress like the #30C3, this rule is almost vital.

Hackers get bored easily, and when they’re bored, they’re starting to look for things to play with. And a network with several thousand connected users is certainly an interesting thing to play with. Some of them might start intercepting the data on the network or do other nasty things with the packets that they can get.

If these packets are encrypted, messing with them is much harder (but not impossible! – see the end of this article). So you want your packets to be always encrypted. And the best way to do that is by using a VPN.

Target audience

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.
Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

Local (OS X) Side

`~/Library/LaunchAgents/pbcopy.plist`

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
     <key>Label</key>
     <string>localhost.pbcopy</string>

Frontend Development

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	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# transcode-video.sh
	#
	# Copyright (c) 2013-2015 Don Melton
	#

	about() {
	cat <<EOF
	$program 5.13 of April 8, 2015

	#!/bin/bash
	# git-cleanup-repo
	#
	# Author: Rob Miller <[email protected]>
	# Adapted from the original by Yorick Sijsling

	git checkout master &> /dev/null

	# Make sure we're working with the most up-to-date version of master.
	git fetch

	# must be absolute path
	CATOP = $(PWD)/ca
	# see https://gist.github.com/4570053 for sample ca.conf
	CACONF = $(CATOP)/../ca.conf

	OPENSSL = openssl
	DAYS = -days 3652
	CADAYS = -days 3652
	REQ = $(OPENSSL) req -config $(CACONF)
	CA = $(OPENSSL) ca -config $(CACONF)

	_ssh_auth_save() {
	ln -sf "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" "$HOME/.ssh/ssh-auth-sock.$HOSTNAME"
	}
	alias screen='_ssh_auth_save ; export HOSTNAME=$(hostname) ; screen'
	alias tmux='_ssh_auth_save ; export HOSTNAME=$(hostname) ; tmux'

	#!/bin/sh

	###
	# SOME COMMANDS WILL NOT WORK ON macOS (Sierra or newer)
	# For Sierra or newer, see https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos
	###

	# Alot of these configs have been taken from the various places
	# on the web, most from here
	# https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/5b3c8418ed42d93af2e647dc9d122f25cc034871/.osx

	# to generate your dhparam.pem file, run in the terminal
	openssl dhparam -out /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparam.pem 2048