image of michi lehr
Hi, I am Michi
Enjoying life with climbing, sports with boards, mountain biking, traveling, photography, videography and software engineering.

Latest posts

Posted on 20. October 2024

Reverse Engineering the API of a turnstile controller

Featured image Reverse Engineering the API of a turnstile controller
Some years ago when I built the software for an online ticketing platform, we wanted to have turnstiles which can be used to improve the pass through rate of the ticket scanning process at larger events.

We found a fitting product and the seller promised us that the controller of the turnstile can easily be integrated into our local on-site application. Of course it was not as easy as promised. We only received a DLL as an SDK for C++ for the protocol called LL268 and a demo application. So how to integrate this turnstile into our software?

Well, eventually I was able to reverse engineer the core functionality of the API so we were able to use it for our purpose. Since the product is not used any longer, I can finally write about it.
Posted on 8. September 2024

Authorization vs. Authentication - Securing Web Applications

Featured image Authorization vs. Authentication - Securing Web Applications
Although authorization sounds similar to authentication and a relationship between the two exists, they are not the same and play a different role in the data security process.

In 2021, Broken Access Control moved up from the fifth to the first position in the OWASP Top10. Besides, I did report some serious vulnerabilities to SaaS companies regarding unhandled authorization in the last months.

That's why it is important to know the difference between the two and what else to take care of to protect resources and information from being read or altered by third parties which should be prevented from doing so in order to secure web applications.
Posted on 26. January 2024

Shrink an image of a single board computer like the Raspberry PI for a smaller SD card

When you back up a sd card and attempt to flash the image to a second card, it can happen that you will be greeted by the message "Too small.". This can happen because two sd cards from even the same vendor could have slightly different sizes.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to shrink an image to a specific size so it can fit on a smaller sd card.
Posted on 26. December 2023

Full-Text Search with MySQL and Doctrine

Featured image Full-Text Search with MySQL and Doctrine
MySQL has supported Full-Text Search (FTS) functionality for quite some time. The (FTS) capability was already introduced in MySQL version 3.23.23, which was released in September 2001, and yet I have never used it - until now.
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