Cossack Labs
Cossack Labs
development
10 Jun 2020
3 Mistakes to Avoid When Dealing With OpenSSL Versions and iOS Apps
OpenSSL complexity starts with its version string. Apple, Carthage, and some dependency analysis tools have different opinions about it. Here is how we dealt with them and submitted iOS app to the App Store.
10 Jun 2020
Swift Way to Build OpenSSL for Carthage iOS, As We Did It for Themis
This story is dedicated to fellow developers struggling with updating Carthage package with the latest OpenSSL for iOS and macOS apps. Here you will find the scripts, error messages, testing matrix, and our working solution for Themis to this no small feat. We believe it could save you time then you meet the same task.
28 Oct 2019
Security Engineering Advice: 4 Ways to Prepare for Security Incidents
Don't be afraid of security incidents, prepare to them in advance. Choose the scenario that suits your company and fits your budget.
5 Sep 2019
Implementing End-to-End encryption in Bear App
How we helped the Bear note taking app for iOS/macOS, which decided to implement note encryption for their huge existing user base. A story about finding a balance between usability, security, and mobile platforms' restrictions.
4 Apr 2019
Building Defence in Depth for Your Data Using Acra
How to protect the data in your app infrastructure using the defence in depth approach, explained on the example of Acra encryption suite.
22 Nov 2018
How to Implement Tracing in a Modern Distributed Application
A battle-tested explanation of why tracing is a very useful technique you can benefit from in your projects. A story from the trenches of implementing distributed tracing in our Acra data security suite.
29 May 2018
Reducing Docker Image Size for Acra
We tried out and described a few approaches to reducing the size of Docker images for the components of our database encryption suite Acra. As a result, we found a way to reduce the container size by roughly 62 times.
23 Nov 2017
Auditable Macros in C Code
Turning macros into auditable C code in a highly parameterised cross-platform cryptographic library Themis with a help of preprocessor customization.
21 Sep 2017
Replacing OpenSSL with Libsodium
The second article in a series of three that covers our experiments with different sources of crypto primitives for Themis. This time we tested its multi-platform capabilities with Libsodium.
6 Mar 2017
Importing with ctypes in Python: fighting overflows
Best cases of boring technical debt are understood when reflected properly. This post addresses a simple one: inelegant flags in core C library ended up breaking Python tests. This is no small case to us: tests breaking sometimes might end up in things seeming to work, but not really working. Not something you can afford yourself when you're doing cryptography, do you?
