Since the start of my Doctoral studies I’ve always performed the literature exploration “the hard way”. Meaning, that I’ve performed most of my literature searches by hand, attempting to manually locate the key articles in the domain. While I’ve got an in-depth comprehension of the field, it remains possible that I’ve overlooked some of interesting literature clusters. However, there always existed a possibility to avoid such mistakes: by performing a thorough bibliometrics study instead of the simple literature overview.

Some days ago I’ve descried my new password management model, where I’ve mentioned a tool named pass. By the end of the year 2021 I’ve been using this tool for some time for my passwords management, while in 2022 it became more of a fallback measure for my backups and secure password storage. Today I’ll discuss some of the features of this tool, as well as my personal setup and use-case.

Today we are going to speak about the self-hosting. Since the start of January I’ve spent some time on configuration of my home server for my personal applications. The idea behind this transition was to put some more distance between myself and my dependence on the external services, where I’ve no means to control my personal data. The last year, I’ve already performed the transition from using the Google Drive and Dropbox to the usage of more private NextCloud solutions (offered by my university,as well as a privacy respecting server in Zurich). Nevertheless, when I’ve discovered a long unused motherboard, belonging to my school laptop, I’ve decided to give it a new life.

After receiving a hardware authentication token for the New Year, I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the configuration. Even though I’d already modified my security model by the end of 2021, I needed to reconsider it once again. Now my password management framework comprises three elements:

1. Hardware security token (OnlyKey) for most sensitive credentials and 2FA (two facto authentication like OTP, FIDO2 / U2F)
2. Self-hosted cloud storage (Vaultwarden) for less sensitive credential
3. Encrypted password database (Pass-Tomb) on a USB

Each of these elements requires a separate post, but for now I’ll focus only on the first part. What is more, I’ll separate the content into several parts: in this particular part I’ll describe how it’s possible to configure the OnlyKey as second factor authentication for Linux system login (or sudo).

It’s highly probable, that the days to come will be marked with a lot of activity on this blog. Some of the last discussions pushed me forward to start publishing on several topics I’ve considered as not worth of it. Among the most interesting points comes the discussion of the R related ecosystem. This topic regroups both the discussion about the FOS Software, as well as the R language itself.