The edulogon development blog

Since my last post, developments have been very fast-paced. The project’s inception was four months ago, and finally everything has come together. Today I am proud to be releasing the first publicly available version of eduLogon.

Google checkout integration is complete. Activation server-side and client-side code is complete. The software has its own logo/color scheme/branding/fancy website/slogan with the help of some graphics and design assets that I purchased rights to. Various minor bugs and improvements were coded. I have reached an agreement with CodeWall technologies, a vendor of a powerful .net code obfuscator/decompilation protector, to secure the distributed binary from cracking/hacking attempts. UMD’s IT department (of which I am also a student employee) got wind of the project, and the department’s director weighed in. They have some non-technical issues related to perception of affiliation etc that I am working with them to address, but it sounds like there won’t be any drastic decrees that the software is not to be used on the UMD network or anything, so for the most part I think I’m good on that front.

One last security feature has been added to the code – it is now not possible to edit the logon service urls in the xml.conf file to coerce eduLogon into sending passwords to unauthorized servers. The urls of authorized university authentication servers are now digitially signed by me, and if the address appearing in the conf file does not match the signature, eduLogon displays a security warning, and will refuse to send any saved passwords to the addess that is listed. The user can elect to manually enter a password if they want, but only after they have been informed of the security concern. This way, hackers cannot make malicous changes to the configuration file, but users at unsupported campuses can still write and test valid configuration files for their campus, a feature I wanted to preserve so that eduLogon can proliferate.

I won’t start the promotions campaign until the 20th, when spring semester classes begin at UMD, so barring the discovery of any issues in 1.0, things probably will be fairly dormant until then. Still, I do feel pretty accomplished to have put it all together, put to real-world use all my programming education and experience, and released my first commercial software application.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:40 am and is filed under eduLogon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.