Microsoft’s Network Policy Server (NPS) has been running network authentication in the enterprise for decades but is now out of the loop when it comes to a modern cloud-first infrastructure. Using an inventive approach, I show that it is possible to overcome its recalcitrance and get it authenticating Azure AD-joined (AADJ) as well as on-prem AD clients. This is the long-form writeup of the project I presented at Microsoft’s Australia-wide Surface Gold & Lighthouse Virtual Event in May 2022....

Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new. –James S.A. Corey Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often the result of a lack of wisdom. –Terry Pratchett Aside of an excuse to quote Corey and Pratchett, I feel like both of those perspectives are relevant to the notion of writing a blog. Some days it really is just about survival, yet those are often the very ones with the most useful lessons learned, and the temptation is to just rush headlong into the next thing rather than stop to reflect and build on them....

Here’s another great PBL case study from my pgcert cybersecurity course, based on this article. In this instance the focus was less on the details of the flaw itself than the circumstances of how it was revealed by the researchers (way too soon) and handled by HTC (way too late). Now, I’m not an expert in the circumstances of this case, but this is a summary of the general points I took from it and successfully presented....

This was a PBL case study in my pgcert cybersecurity course. The problem was outlined in this news article. Essentially at one point mobile providers were using a pre-set voicemail PIN or generating one from a known formula that could be inferred based upon data points such as characteristics of the customer. This would make it a trivial matter to guess a voicemail PIN and access a subscriber’s confidential information....

These days it’s very common to have a single hardware device on the network acting as firewall / gateway / router / proxy / content filter; great for providing a high degree of security while saving cost. Some providers even offer the boon of a managed automatic update to these devices, which sounds great - I mean, why wouldn’t you want to be automatically patched against a vulnerability as soon as there’s a fix or take advantage of new features as soon as they’re available?...