It’s already March but here I am with a blog post to talk about my goals for this tiny corner of the Internet, neatly scoped to the year 2026.

Minimal containers

There are a few security (related) projects that I want to undertake this year. Starting with moving all my containers to my own minimal containers to reduce supply chain risk. Besides the security benefit it’ll also save on disk space & build times.

I’ve already progressed quite a bit on this, with the release of Container::Builder on MetaCPAN being the first step. Now I have the arduous job of migrating all my containers to it.

Blog post coming soon(TM).

SIEMpl

A second project, started two years ago actually, is to get an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) running of SIEMpl. The project has been on hold since last summer due to other priorities in life. To make it a bit more actionable, with the MVP I hope to achieve:

• A (containerized) single node instance of SIEMpl. (using Container::Builder)
• A simple UI to make ad-hoc queries using a SQL-like language. (kinda working already, I wrote a SQL interpreter last summer)
• A simple way of running recurring stored queries on a schedule to implement automatic incidents triggering. (TODO)
• A simple UI to see a list of the incidents generated by the stored queries. (TODO)
• Implementing a parser for Nginx. (Done)
• Implementing a parser for Auth like SSH logs. (Done)
• Implement a parser for each service I have running on the server. (TODO) Ideally this covers login events
• Implement “normalizers” (or abstractions) for these logs. Nginx is both Proxy logs as well as Web server logs, so is Caddy, Apache, … They all need to “fit” in the same SQL table schema. (Done for Web & Authentication events)

This project will also generate the necessary blog posts to clarify my thoughts on each of the components.

Hardening servers

A third project is to implement further hardening. Hardening of my containers by minimizing dependencies, implementing daily builds, seccomp hardening, minimizing rights (this is already the case), … Of course I shouldn’t only strengthen the security of my containers but also of the host running all these services, so I really want to make a nice SELinux setup on the host to tie it up nicely.

Automated backups

A fourth project is to implement a secure and automated backup system for all the data being generated on these servers, since I’m pretty terrible at doing this out of my own volition.

This website

As you’ve noticed by now, I’ve implemented some inline “side characters” to make comments on my own writings. Ideally, I want to expand the “emotions” or “positions” of Bassie en Adriaan to convey more context about how the comment should be interpreted.

I might implement anti-bot/anti-AI scraping on this website too but I’m waiting on SIEMpl to show me how bad the problem really is. It might not stop them, but if I can tarpit them, that would be nice.

Sharing is caring

Despite the AI overlords feeding on my free labour, I want to share more projects and contribute to public repositories in the hopes of being helpful, and to make the world an incredibly tiny bit better.

Final thoughts

Let’s hope I don’t burn out.