In this week, I was mainly dealing with Verilog. Verilog was a hardware description language (HDL) and it was used to describe a digital system. Firstly, I tested out a 8-bit simple up counter and ran it within the terminal. The code was comparable to Altera Quartus II. I had experience with Verilog previously and hence I was very familiar with its implementation. In addition, I tested out a simple AND gate, a comparator, a 3-to-8 decoder and a multiplexer. Read more
This week was all about catching up. The project that I will be working was introduced this week by Dr Shawn which looked both interesting and challenging at the same time. I was assigned to upgrade and improve the functionality of two main parts in an existing design software. As the project was previously worked on by other interns, I spent a large amount of time understanding and catching up to fully grasp it in order to effectively improve its Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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