Info IT

PHD CTF Quals opens up a team registration for the information security contests

The coming December will see a qualification competition for PHD CTF, an international information security contest. The main contests will be held on May 30-31, 2012, in Moscow, Russia, as a part of Positive Hack Days, an international forum on information security.

This year everyone can participate in the qualification competitions: either in CTF Quals, or in CTF Afterparty. The competitions will contest participants’ skills of information security assessment, vulnerability search and exploitation, reverse engineering and hacking in general. The contest conditions will be as close to the real-life ones, as possible: vulnerabilities used for PHD CTF Quals and CTF Afterparty are not made-up but taken from the “wildlife”.

PHD CTF Quals, held on December 10-11, will identify the best teams, who will compete at the main contests on May 30-31, 2012, at the Positive Hack Days forum.

December 12-25 will carry on with individual competitions: the top participants will be awarded with diplomas and certificates from Positive Technologies and will be able to take part in the May contests at the forum.

Registration for the qualification competition is now open.

To register for PHD CTF Quals, visit http://phdays.com/smt.asp?gnum=0
To register for PHD CTF Afterparty, visit http://phdays.com/smt.asp?gnum=1

The participant registration for PHD CTF Quals and PHD CTF Afterparty is closing on November 28, 2011.

For detailed information about the competition visit the corresponding sections of our web site: www.phdays.ru.

Available link for download

Persisting DateTime with zone information

I was stuck a while ago trying to figure out how to map PersistentDateTimeTZ in a GORM class. Its an implementation of Hibernates UserType interface that persists a Joda DateTime value using 2 columns - one for the actual timestamp and one for the time zone. The DateTime class contains time zone information but a SQL timestamp column is time zone agnostic so you can lose data when the value is saved (the same exact problem exists when persisting java.util.Date values).

I could never figure out how to map the user type to my domain class property correctly. Just doing:

static mapping = {
 dateTimeProperty type: PersistentDateTimeTZ
}

Failed with:

org.hibernate.MappingException: property mapping has wrong number of columns.

I seem to remember someone on the Grails mailing list suggesting I tried treating the value as an embedded type. That also didnt work as GORM embedded types have to be Groovy classes in grails-app/domain and PersistentDateTimeTZ is written in Java and lives in a library jar.

I finally found the solution in the 2nd Edition of The Definitive Guide to Grails (which I cant recommend enough, by the way). The trick is to pass a closure specifying the two columns to the property definition in the mapping builder. The working code looks like this:

static mapping = {
 dateTimeProperty type: PersistentDateTimeTZ, {
 column name: "date_time_property_timestamp"
 column name: "date_time_property_zone"
 }
}

The order of the columns corresponds to the order of the values returned by the sqlTypes() method of whatever UserType implementation youre using.

Available link for download

People Behaving Badly and information securitys tie in

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