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About Spyros

Addicted to any kind of hacks, coding, django, debian, vim and caffeine.
Author Archive | Spyros

Diamond BVU195 – The 2 monitor setup Rocks!

The last week I was looking for a device that will allow me to connect a second monitor at my macbook. After a bit of investigation I ordered the Diamond BVU195, which is a usb adapter that outputs the desired DVI connection. After downloading and installing the required drivers, my 2 monitor setup was ready.

2 Monitor Setup

Tiger, Leopard & Snow are supported from a stable version and there is a beta one for Lion, which I did not test yet. Overall, I would recommend the BVU195, as a relatively cheap solution. However, keep always in mind that you will be left only with one usb port available (but worth the pain, all the way…).

Diamond BVU195

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Galway, Salthill – It feels a bit like home

After almost 2 years in Limerick, which I really really enjoyed, I moved in Salthill. The new apartment is great and the view at the Atlantic Ocean feels a bit like home.

Below just some random photos I took recently.

Atlantic Ocean, Salthill, Galway
Atlantic Ocean, Salthill, Galway
Atlantic Ocean, Salthill, Galway
Atlantic Ocean, Salthill, Galway

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BEAST vs HTTPS

Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong presented a new attack on the SSL/TLS protocol family using an utility named BEAST.

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Customized “see through” Desktop

I always wanted to build a customized desktop that would have a fancy “see through” look. Below are some photos from the final build.

The CPU capabilities, powered by Intel i7.

Top CPU

The final Box, Day & Night pics!

Desktop at Night

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Accelerating SSL/TLS protocol stacks on GPUs

Lately, there is a new upcoming trend for accelerating security protocols on Graphics Processor Units (GPUs). The in parallel processing that GPUs offer, in combination with the several cores with which GPUs are equipped, reveal a promising and quite attractive alternative. Of course, there is always the drawback of power consumption (110-300 Watts), which could be 2-4 times more than the one that the latest generations of CPUs report. Nevertheless, the performance benefits especially for expensive computations (such as RSA operations) yield a 9-10 times faster processing. Until now, most of the experiments were targeting cryptanalysis tasks, but in the future we might see security protocols to be ported in languages like CUDA or OpenCL. Here is a very interesting and recent investigation for Accelerating TLS/SSL on GPUs. The comparison betweenGPUs and CPUs is very impressive. Imagine that the authors did not even patched the OpenSSL and they only used a web proxy structure in order to off-load the workload on GPUs. Already the first signs for porting security stacks appeared: Running CyaSSL on a GPU. Graphics Processor Units are portablecompetitively cheap and extremely powerful. There are no guarantees that this emerging approach will be adopted, but all the facts show a great value for performance reasons.

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