Synopse Open Source

In order to follow best practice, our .private key files are always protected by a password.  A random value with enough length and entropy is always proposed by the ECC tool when a key pair is generated, and could be used directly.
It is always preferred to trust a computer to create true randomness (and SynCrypto.pas's secure TAESPRNG was designed to be the best possible seed, using hardware entropy if available), than using our human brain, which could be defeated by dictionary-based password attacks.
Brute force cracking would be almost impossible, since PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA256 Password-Based Key Derivation Function with 60,000 rounds is used, so rainbow tables (i.e. pre-computed passwords list) will be inoperative, and each password trial would take more time than with a regular Key Derivation Function.

The issue with strong passwords is that they are difficult to remember. If you use not pure random passwords, but some easier to remember values with good entropy, you may try some tools like https://xkpasswd.net/s which returns values like $$19*wrong*DRIVE*read*61$$.
But even then, you will be able to remember only a dozen of such passwords. In a typical public key infrastructure, you may create hundredths of keys, so remembering all passwords is no option for an average human being as (you and) me.

At the end, you end up with using a tool to store all your passwords (last trend is to use an online service with browser integration), or - admit it - store them in an Excel document protected by a password. Most IT people - and even security specialists - end with using such a mean of storage, just because they need it.
The weaknesses of such solutions can be listed:

• How could we trust closed source software and third-party online services?
• Even open source like http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html may appear weak (no PBKDF, no AFSplit, managed C#, SHA as PRNG);
• The storage is as safe as the "master password" is safe;
• If the "master password" is compromised, all your passwords are published;
• You need to know the master password to add a new item to the store.

The ECC tool is able to work in "cheat mode", storing all .private key files generated passwords in an associated .cheat local file, encrypted using a cheat.public key.

As a result:

• Each key pair will have its own associated .cheat file, so you only unleash one key at a time;
• The .cheat file content is meaningless without the cheat.private key and its master password, so you can manage and store them together with your .private files;
• Only the cheat.public key is needed when creating a key pair, so you won't leak your master password, and even could generate keys in an automated way, on a distant server;
• The cheat.private key will be safely stored in a separated place, only needed when you need to recover a password;
• It uses strong File Encryption, with proven PBKDF, AFSplit, AES-PRNG, and ECDH/ECIES algorithms.

There are still a few days for "very early birds" offer for EKON 20 conference, and meet us for 3 sessions (including a half-day training/introduction to mORMot)! Join us the 7-9th of November in Düsseldorf! Our sessions are not restricted to mORMot, but will use mORMot to illustrate some  […]

You should have noticed that Delphi 10.1 Berlin has been released. Our Open Source projects, including mORMot and SynPDF and their associated documentation have been updated to support this new revision. Any additional feedback is welcome, as usual!

We have seen previously how the ORM part of the framework is able to provide an Audit Trail for change tracking.
It is a very convenient way of storing the change of state of the data.

On the other side, in any modern SOA solution, data is not at the center any more, but services.
Sometimes, the data is not stored within your server, but in a third-party Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Being able to monitor the service execution of the whole system becomes sooner or later mandatory.

Our framework allows to create an Audit Trail of any incoming or outgoing service operation, in a secure, efficient and automated way.

If you compare with existing client/server SOA solutions (in Delphi, Java, C# or even in Go or other frameworks), mORMot's interface-based callback mechanism sounds pretty unique and easy to work with.

Most Events Oriented solutions do use a set of dedicated messages to propagate the events, with a centralized Message Bus (like MSMQ or JMS), or a P2P/decentralized approach (see e.g. ZeroMQ or NanoMsg). In practice, you are expected to define one class per message, the class fields being the message values. You would define e.g. one class to notify a successful process, and another class to notify an error. SOA services would eventually tend to be defined by a huge number of individual classes, with the temptation of re-using existing classes in several contexts.

Our interface-based approach allows to gather all events:

• In a single interface type per notification, i.e. probably per service operation;
• With one method per event;
• Using method parameters defining the event values.

Since asynchronous notifications are needed most of the time, method parameters would be one-way, i.e. defined only as const - in such case, an evolved algorithm would transparently gather those outgoing messages, to enhance scalability when processing such asynchronous events. Blocking request may also be defined as var/out, as we will see below, inWorkflow adaptation.

Behind the scene, the framework would still transmit raw messages over IP sockets (currently over a WebSockets connection), like other systems, but events notification would benefit from using interfaces, on both server and client sides.
We will now see how...

Illustrated Spare Parts Catalog is, as its name suggests, a software for creating and publishing spare parts catalogs. It uses mORMot for client-server communication and ORM, and SynPdf for the reporting. Sounds like a powerful solution. It is also a testimony that you could use big databases (20 GB  […]

We just noticed a nice feedback from a mORMot user. Vojko Cendak commented the well-known DataSnap analysis based on Speed & Stability tests blog article written by Roberto some months years (!) ago. It is not meant to be the final word, perhaps there was some tuning possible for RTC (which is  […]

You know certainly that our mORMot Open Source framework is an ORM, i.e. mapping objects to a relational / SQL database (Object Relational Mapping).
You may have followed also that it is able to connect to a NoSQL database, like MongoDB, and that the objects are then mapped via an ODM (Object Document Mapping) - the original SQL SELECT are even translated on the fly to MongoDB queries.

But thanks to mORMot, it is not "SQL vs NoSQL" - but "SQL and NoSQL".
You are not required to make an exclusive choice.
You can share best of both worlds, depending on your application needs.

In fact, the framework is able to add NoSQL features to a regular relational / SQL database, by storing JSON documents in TEXT columns.

In your end-user code, you just define a variant field in the ORM, and store a TDocVariant document within.
We also added some dedicated functions at SQL level, so that SQLite3 could be used as embedded fast engine, and provide advanced WHERE clauses on this JSON content.

An enthusiastic mORMot user, named willo in the forum, just started a blog about his experiments with our framework.

The information there is clear, simple, and right to the point.
If you are a little lost in our huge documentation, it is a good place to start!

One common problem when handling dates and times, is that time is shown and entered as local, whereas the computer should better use non-geographic information - especially on a Client-Server architecture, where both ends may not be on the same physical region.

A time zone is a region that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes.
Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time.
Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by a whole number of hours, or minutes.
Even worse, some countries use daylight saving time for part of the year, typically by changing clocks by an hour, twice every year.

The main rule is that any date and time stored should be stored in UTC, or with an explicit Zone identifier (i.e. an explicit offset to the UTC value).
Our framework expects this behavior: every date/time value stored and handled by the ORM, SOA, or any other part of it, is expected to be UTC-encoded.
At presentation layer (e.g. the User Interface), conversion to/from local times should take place, so that the end-user is provided with friendly clock-wall compatible timing.

As you may guess, handling time zones is a complex task, which should be managed by the Operating System itself.
Since this cultural material is constantly involving, it is updated as part of the OS.

In practice, current local time could be converted from UTC from the current system-wide time zone. One of the only parameters you have to set when installing an Operating System is to pickup the keyboard layout... and the current time zone to be used. But in a client-server environment, you may have to manage several time zones on the server side: so you can't rely on this global setting.

One sad - but predictable - news is that there is no common way of encoding time zone information.
Under Windows, the registry contains a list of time zones, and the associated time bias data. Most POSIX systems (including Linux and Mac OSX) do rely on the IANA database, also called tzdata - you may have noticed that this particular package is often updated with your system.
Both zone identifiers do not map, so our framework needed something to be shared on all systems.