I came across a great XCode project wrapper for OpenSSL yesterday, by Stephen Lombardo. This is an XCode project file that contains a target to build OpenSSL from source, and works with both Mac and iOS projects. I made some modifications to it, in order to make it work by just dropping in the OpenSSL source tarball, without having to dirty up your source tree with the extracted OpenSSL distribution.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Download the OpenSSL source.
2. Put the downloaded OpenSSL source tar.gz into the same folder as openssl.xcodeproj (I put it in Library/openssl within my project tree).
3. Drag the openssl.xcodeproj file into your main project tree in XCode.
4. Right-click on your project target, and add openssl.xcodeproj under “Direct Dependencies” on the General tab.

5. On the Build tab for your project’s target, find the “Header Search Paths” option, and add the path:

   $(SRCROOT)/Library/openssl/build/openssl.build/openssl/include

   (Assuming you’ve put openssl.xcodeproj at the path Library/openssl — adjust as necessary).

6. Expand your target’s “Link Binary With Libraries” build stage, and drag libcrypto.a from the openssl.xcodeproj group.

Then, you can just import and use as normal (#import <openssl/dsa.h>, etc).

Download it here

I recently had a bit of a security breach – some lowlife broke into my account and injected some phishing stuff into my personal webmail software. Consequently, I went on a bit of a security binge and deleted some apps I wasn’t using much, changed all of my passwords to ridiculously long strings, and set up layers of HTTP authentication on my WordPress login/admin pages, the latter of which is described here.

The general idea is to make it hard to get to the login/admin pages in the first place, which should block some attacks.

The AskApache password protect WordPress plugin will do all of this for you, unless it thinks your webserver doesn’t have the supporting software. It failed for me on Site5, saying I lacked HTTP digest authentication support, which is actually not true, as it’s enabled. I couldn’t be bothered debugging it though, so I proceeded with the manual route.

Create the password file

First, I created an htpasswd file, containing a login and password. There’re many sites describing how to do this, but on the terminal, it’s fairly easy:

htpasswd -c /path/to/.htpasswd myusername

Note that it’s a good idea to put the .htpasswd file somewhere outside the web root – your account’s home directory is one option.

Protect the login page

I opened up the .htaccess in the WordPress root folder, and added the following:

ErrorDocument 401 default
 
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
AuthName "Blog"
AuthType Basic
 
<Files "wp-login.php">
    require valid-user
</Files>

Note that ‘ErrorDocument 401 default’ line – this is in place to avoid getting a ’404′ error whenever you load up the login page. I’m not entirely sure of the details, but it seems that if the rewrite module is used (the thing that allows WordPress to define an arbitrary website structure, without needing physical files), then this causes problems with HTTP authentication.

Also, if you wish to protect access to the XMLRPC access point as well, you can add the following:

<Files "xmlrpc.php">
    require valid-user
</Files>

However, if you do this, I’m pretty sure pingbacks (the WordPress-specific version of trackbacks) will no longer work. I think trackbacks will still be functional – as far as I know, they use a different access point. If you use a desktop blogging app, you’ll want to make sure it can handle HTTP authentication. I know ecto can.

Protect the admin area

Finally, I created a new .htaccess file in the wp-admin directory, which looks like this:

ErrorDocument 401 default
 
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
AuthName "Blog"
AuthType Basic
 
require valid-user

Alternatively, in ‘inclusive’ mode specify a list of tags/categories to make public – all other tags/categories will remain hidden.

Download

Download the Private Tags plugin at the WordPress plugin page

If you like Private Tags, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload private-tags to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit ‘Private Tags’ settings underneath WordPress settings to configure

Changes

0.1 – Initial release

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