Blogs by Ruben

Tech blog on web, security & embedded
October 30, 2024

Enabling pools in NTS

We previously talked about how secure time is required for a safe internet. We mentioned how we want to increase the adoption of NTS, the secure time synchronization standard built on top of NTP. For this, we proposed to develop a public NTS pool. In this article, we expand on what pooling is, and what is required to enable an NTS pool.
The internet has a hole at the bottom of its trust stack, and we need to do something about it. In particular, the internet needs secure time synchronization to fortify the security of our digital world. In this article, we present a path towards the adoption of securely synchronized time.
When sudo-rs development started, we added several dependencies using Rust’s crates ecosystem to quickly ramp up development. During development we accrued approximately 135 transitive (direct and indirect) dependencies. Once this was identified, we managed to reduce our total dependencies down to three. In this blog, we explain why and how we did this.
In Dutch we have a saying 'meten is weten', which translates to 'to measure is to know'. That sentiment is frequently overlooked in setting up computers and networks.
Thanks to funding from NLNet and ISRG, the sudo-rs team was able to request an audit from Radically Open Security (ROS). In this post, we'll share the findings of the audit and our response to those findings.
When iHub's Bernard van Gastel asked us to help them start with Rust, we were somewhat surprised by their bold step but absolutely happy to assist. In this article we'll describe how we went about designing a workshop for the iHub team.
Most of our web applications use either Node.js or Symfony for their server-side part. Both offer a lot in terms of productivity. But every now and again, when you look at the computing power used or the amount of time a simple HTTP request takes, you can't help to think "what if..?".
CI/CD (continuous integration/continous deployment) is a proces where developers integrate new code into the main branch in regular intervals (preferably several times per day). Using CI/CD allows us to get up to a quick iteration pace and gives us a way to gather feedback quickly.
You might have seen the logo above on your identity card or passport. If you have it on there, then your card contains a NFC chip that allows it to be read by a computer. This way airport customs is supposed to more securely determine if your passport is really yours. But of course we could also try to read it ourselves with our own NFC reader.

The Dutch government offers the AHN [1] as a way to get information about the height of any specific place in the country. They offer this data by using a point cloud. That is, a large set of points with some additional meta information. With the current version of the AHN the resolution of the dataset is about eight points per square meter. This results in about 2.5TB of compressed data for the relatively small area of the Netherlands. While this is something that is not impossible to store locally, it does offer some challenges.

We all want our 3D visualisations to be as real as possible. A basic premise seems to be that they adhere to the laws of physics. No small feat! Or is it?

We decided to give it a go during a two-day programming contest. Our team's idea was to develop a web-based game where the user cycles around and has to avoid crashing into cars. To create the game, we needed a physics engine.

Follow up post on point light shadows in Three.js.

At tweede golf, we value innovation: we take the time to research new technologies and subsequently challenge ourselves to try out these new techniques in order to discover new applications. We also like to learn by doing: build something first, ask questions later.