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Christopher Frenz

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Top Stories by Christopher Frenz

When dictating password policies to users, it is common for such policies to require that users generate passwords that contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and special characters. Moreover, it is well established that the strengths of such passwords are further enhanced if the passwords do not in any way resemble dictionary words, since minor substitutions of dictionary words and names are often included in the dictionaries used in dictionary-based attacks and in some rainbow table variants. Thus "D3veloper" would be a less than ideal password since potentially it's an easily guessed variant of the word "developer." A common recommendation for dealing with this issue is to suggest the use of randomly generated passwords such as "0Y=/S?tV". However, such passwords often pose great difficulty for many users to remember, which ca... (more)

The Development of a Perl-based Password Complexity Filter

If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such risks via the proper configuration of firewalls, careful crafting of Access Control Lists, the application of updates, and the judicious application of file permission, among other measures, it's important that one of the most fundamental ways of improving the security of a computer or network resour... (more)

Error Prevention in VS.NET

With the release of Visual Studio .NET and the structured error-handling capabilities of the .NET Framework came significant improvements in the way that VS programmers are able to capture and deal with programmatic errors. Yet these more robust abilities do not lessen the importance of one of the most time-tested means of error handling: prevention. In this article I will highlight various methods of data validation that can be used to eliminate potentially problematic errors before they have a chance to occur. Data validation checks any inputted data for potential problems pri... (more)

Windows for Supercomputers

In late May 2004, Microsoft made the announcement that it was considering entering the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Market, a market that has traditionally been dominated by custom-engineered Unix-based machines. In recent years, advances in technology have made possible the construction of lower-cost computing clusters that utilize off-the-shelf hardware such as Intel- and AMD-based processors. The operating system of choice for these lower-end clusters has been Linux. In fact, this market is representative of one of Linux's strongest footholds. Many in the Linux camp consid... (more)

Why 'LiveCD' Should Be a Part of Every Computer User's Vocabulary

Throughout the last decade, society has witnessed an explosion of network connectivity among PCs and mobile devices as well as a vast proliferation of networked applications, ranging from Web-based email to online banking. The end result of this is that network connectivity has become an almost indispensable resource for many individuals. Yet along with the convenience and flexibility of anytime, anywhere network access, society has also seen an increase in computer-related security and privacy concerns, with the most dreaded being the possibility of identity theft.  While numero... (more)