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Working on a cryptographic library comes with certain challenges - like testing all the functions with (ideally all) incorrect inputs. In our recent project we leveraged Python's testing framework pytest with its support for coverage reporting to ensure we get to handle various - but very specific - kinds of corrupted input.

When creating a library with some rather uncommon features, it is vital to ensure its users will be able to correctly use it by providing a useful documentation. Turns out this is possible even for Python projects.

As most of the servers running actual software are these days virtual machines, in our case running under KVM, having a serial console accessible from the hypervisor is always a good idea in case troubleshooting is needed without network access.

Apache Web Server users can setup HTTP authentication against LDAP by installing and configuring appropritate module. For NGINX users the life can get more complicated when they need such feature. However, there is an easy solution.

The well-known rclone tool for accessing and synchronizing cloud-based storage can have its configuration encrypted using a symmetric cipher with password-derived key. However some elaborate work is needed to provide a higher protection of the configuration secrets - for example using the YubiKey 5 security token. There is alredy some development under way to streamline such usage.