One week in

[ewx]

I've been at nCipher for a little over a week now. I've spent a lot of that time bugging people for braindumps on various subjects, and suffered a certain amount of information overload as a consequence.

Parallel to that I've been reading lots of the company's internal and published documentation, and writing a little symbiosisware program to do things to the HSM plugged into my computer (the company makes hardware security modules, which accelerate crypto operations, store keys and possibly other data in a secure environment, run applications in a secure environment, etc.)

I got it to encrypt a string quite early on but getting it to decrypt it again took longer; the decryption key in this case was protected by a set of smart cards, and getting at it involved extra calls to load data from smart cards into the module before the decryption key itself could be loaded. Anyway I got that all working at about 18:15 on Friday evening, and promptly went home feeling reasonably satisfied.

I've generated quite a few documentation bug reports in the process, something that seems to be quite well received.

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Nice one! (Loading smart cards has been quite a bane of my existence; I don't know whether it's me being crap, the library being a pig to use, or everyone else just playing jokes on me...)

By the way, what do you mean by symbiosisware?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

In this case, software with lots of things hard-coded so you have to edit and recompile where normally you'd expect it to listen to command line options, examine the key to see what type it is, etc.