Welcome to my blog. Here I’ll aim to post weekly updates on my research progress and other development bits I’ve been up to in the week. With a bit of luck there will be deep dives into topics I’ve discovered something about, particularly when they’re otherwise poorly documented online.
Void Processes: Minimising privilege by default
Recently I concluded the work on my Part III (M.Eng) dissertation. This was on Void Processes, a mechanism to statically distribute fine-grained privilege to application processes on Linux. My dissertation is available here. I plan to make a series of posts over the next few weeks documenting my findings in smaller snippets, particularly the experience of voiding mount namespaces. In the future, I hope to produce some work which increases the performance of creating empty namespaces....
Chia Database Torrents 🌱👨💻🌐
Having trouble keeping your Chia database in sync? Database corruption leading to days or weeks of syncing? These Chia database torrents might help you out. I had the same problem myself, and tried to backup the database file like I would most things. Unfortunately it snapshots and deduplicates incredibly poorly, as much of the file changes almost immediately after restarting. Given that I can’t be the only one having these problems, I extended my backup script to create torrents of the database when I snapshot it....
Drone CI and Crypto Honeypots 💰🍯📚
One gloomy Tuesday evening, I SSHed into my CI server and ran htop as I had hundreds of times before. The machine is pinned running my jobs, but wait… Something is wrong. htop showing bad things I certainly wasn’t running any jobs involving Tensorflow, and I’m not in the habit of mining cryptocurrencies on my CI server. This post will cover the series of events that lead to this happening, what happened, and the learnings I’ve taken away from it....