Blog@AESTE

Photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs)

This week, I made one more step of progress by implementing the Certificate Revocation List (CRL). The CRL holds a list of certificates that had to be revoked before their expiry date for a particular reason. In our case, that reason would be to handle the case where the customers can make early renewals for their subscription. But because they are already holding a valid certificate from their last payment date, we would need to revoke that certificate and supply them Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-12-17 ago

Week One

This was the first week being an Intern at Aeste. One of the tasks given this week was to learn about Git. It’s a version control system primarily used to efficiently manage code in software development. There are a lot features that makes Git a powerful management tool. We can ‘commit’ any change we’ve done on a ‘branch’ we’re working on. Lots more Git features were tested on a sandbox Git repository to further our understanding on how Git works. Read more…

By Marcos Concon, 6 years2018-12-13 ago

A long journey ahead (Update March 2019)

On the first day of the internship, I set up my AESTE account and imported the PKCS#12 certificate into the chromium browser. As I started interacting with the linux environment, I spent some time reading through Linux commands online. Some of the most basic commands were shown below. cd: change directory ls: list mkdir: make directory rmdir: remove directory mv: move files cat: display the contents of a file nano: open a text editor In addition, I learned about the Read more…

By Jun Wen, 6 years2018-12-12 ago

Slowly Gitting It

Internship begins this week. As Dr Shawn was not around, I was introduced to the work environment by my colleague Gabriel. First things first, I got into setting up my work environment and got into knowing how things run in the company with the help of Gabriel. After the introduction, I went into the tasks assigned by Dr Shawn for this week which were to understand how to use Git ( a version control system) and WT (or pronounced Witty) Read more…

By Matthew Yong, 6 years2018-12-11 ago

Progress Above All Else

If you have been following my blogs for awhile, it is very clear from the last few blog posts or so, that my progress on my current project has been quite slow. The main reason would be that I stucked myself trying to figure out how I could get the automatic certificate installation working in the browser. The process has been quite miserable, to say the least. The roadblocks just kept coming, one after another. It is no wonder now, Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-12-10 ago

The WebCrypto API

Following up on last week’s post, it was decided that we would generate the private keys in the user’s browser, and then it would be uploaded to the server for the creation of the certificate. At first glance, this seemed to compromise security because by right the private key should not be anywhere else other than in the user’s possession. However, it would even have its own MIME type if it is not allowed to transmit the private keys somewhere Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-12-09 ago

Back to Square One

There is nothing much to be said for this week. The only implementation I’ve attempted to get done for this week, is the part where the server application interfaces with the WooCommerce REST API, in order to create products and coupons, when an organization makes an order for a certificate. Even so, I have yet to get it fully working, as I have some weird issues with boost::json parser. Regardless, not too long after that, Dr Shawn gave me access Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-11-19 ago

So it Continues…

As time goes on, the details and requirements of the project start to emerge themselves progressively. At this point of time, we have two kinds of products, one for individuals and another for organizations. In the case of organizations, they have the choice of buying an intermediate CA certificate and manage the issuing of new certificates themselves, or they entrust us with that process. Now if it is the latter option, the intermediate CA certificate will be stored in our Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-11-14 ago

PKCS#12 in OpenSSL

On a previous blog post, I talked about the flow of my project in detail, but then I realized that I was missing something important. The crux of the matter was I mentioned that when the customers have made the order and paid for the subscription, the certificate would be created and an email will be sent to them, with a download link provided to install that certificate into the browser. This actually only applies to individual users. What about Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-11-08 ago

Hitting a Brick Wall

It was about time to start writing some code since I already got the gist of how the application is gonna work overall. Nothing much has been done at this point, but so far I had set up two REST endpoints to handle both Subscription Created and Updated webhooks. As mentioned before, the Subscription Created endpoint is responsible for saving the subscription ID into the database temporarily as well as marking it as a subscription CREATED event. That’s all it Read more…

By Gabriel Tan, 6 years2018-10-22 ago

Engineering Elegance