OSX and Aladdin eToken

December 4th, 2008 @ 22:00 by Willem

Due to the nature of my work, and my fondness of Apple products I wasn’t able to get my Aladdin eTokens working with OSX. After several months of not trying to crack this I decided to try it again.
The trigger for me was stumbling on the possibility of adding so-called keyfiles to the eToken for accessing TrueCrypt volumes.

First challenge was the eToken PKI software for OSX… Thankfully I’m a Certified eToken guru, so I’ve got access to their download area (you will have to get your own software). The current version of the eToken software for OSX is v4.55. I installed the Aladdin software on OSX 10.5.5.

This time, the installation of the software was successful, and the software is almost identical to the Windows version (PKI Monitor and eToken Properties software).

eToken PKI Software

eToken PKI Software for OSX

After the installation you can configure various application to utilize the power of eTokens. I configured FireFox and TrueCrypt (so far) to use an eToken. (more…)

FireFox 3 Color Management

August 27th, 2008 @ 22:36 by Willem

In the ‘old’ days, Safari was probably the only Internet browser with some decent color management. The problem was that images displayed in Firefox and Internet Explorer looked a bit desaturated and lighter.

Now, in FireFox 3 you have the opportunity of enabling color management. Just set the following configuration option to ‘true’ (by double clicking) in the FireFox configuration settings (to access the config-part of FireFox, just type about:config in the address bar).

gfx.color_management.enabled

This feature is turned off by default. Restart firefox and be amazed by the colors on your photos on the Internet

FireFox 3 Bug??

July 22nd, 2008 @ 23:00 by Willem

Like most security conscious people I use Firefox (FF) for my everyday browsing on the Internets. So when the Mozilla guys released version 3 I installed it on all my machines (2 Windows and 2 OSX platforms).

It was a bit getting used to. The underlying FF part had been changed. Bookmarks, history etc are all stored in sqlite databases. So no more flatfiles. This took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but finally I got ‘there’.

Using FF was business as usual… Apart from one very annoying bug; Opening new windows (not new tabs) results often in an empty bookmarks bar. And this is happening on Windows and OSX versions of FF.
The bookmarks are ‘there’ but not click-able. Using the right mouse button (on OSX: ctrl-mouse click) on the bookmarks bar and selecting ‘Open All in Tabs‘, FF opens every bookmark in the bar.

The only way of restoring the proper bar is the completely shutdown FF and restart it. After that it works for a certain amount of time.

The problem isn’t isolated to my environment. Just google on the issue, and you’ll find more people. There’s one suggestion I haven’t tried yet. Starting with a fresh/clean profile, but I do need my settings/passwords/bookmarks. I’m lost without those :(

UPDATE: I tried a new profile, and this seemed to work. After this I started to repopulate the new profile with the old settings, etc. Everything went fine until the point where I added the extensions. It seems that even old / not active extensions (SwitchProxy in my case) are still able to f*ck things up.

FireFox 3 Dialog Boxes

July 8th, 2008 @ 21:40 by Willem

Firefox is the default browser on all my platform, and every once in a while I run into strange dialog boxes.
E.g., this evening I updated some digital certificates for the test environment of VeriSign MPKI backend. These certificates are issued by a (private) VeriSign CA. So there’s no trust by default.

After generating the keypair in FireFox 3 I got the positive dialog box as showed below.

No problem so far, but the next dialog box ’scared’ me a little;

This dialog box, or at least the result, would remove (or delete) the certificate I just generated. The issueing CA is not installed in FireFox (or on the machine itself for all it matters). But in fact the certificate was installed in the Crypto/Certificate store of FireFox, and I could use it to access the VeriSign test backend.

So, eventhough, FireFox warns the user that the content will be deleted (or not added), it doesn’t exactly does that at all. Let’s see if I can file a bug report, because this occured on all 4 certificates I generated/imported.