Tuesday, May 31, 2005 12:31 PM
by
methylamine
New Version of CryptoUtility
Please have a look at:
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/busybeebuilder
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/cryptoutility
CryptoUtility: My friend J Sawyer and I published CryptoUtility as part of an article on high-security crypto in a real world application last year, in the November 2004 MSDN magazine....see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/11/CryptoUtility/default.aspx
Anyway, J didn't really, er, um...LIKE...my UI. Yes, I admit it... My name is Michael Stuart, and I do not design pretty UI's.
J did up a very nice property-control admin UI, and I've revamped the solution file to include it and got rid of a bunch of superfluous other stuff. The new Admin Wizard is very nice! Thanks J.
The rest of the CryptoUtility--that is, the core Crypto stuff--is unchanged and still rock-solid.
The MSI installs buildable source, binaries, and the documentation. I've updated the documentation to work with the new admin wizard UI.
The key new feature is that the Admin Wizard creates a setup file for CryptoUtility, complete with everything necessary to install it on a blank machine. It then password-encrypts the setup config file; you take that file, and copies of the CryptoUtility binaries, and put them on a USB key. Then, you run around the various servers in your farm, plug the USB key in, copy the binaries to whereever, and run the wizard in command-line mode.
Why is this better? Because only one person, the admin, ever has access to the symmetric crypto key for your server farm. He or she knows the password to the config file containing the ONLY cleartext copy of that key. It's a secure install process--much better than the old admin utility.