It has been a long time since we posted in this blog. We have been very busy for the past couple of years. But it is time we connect again with our users. iKnode is very much alive and we have been hard at work making it a world class service. The purpose of this post is to give you an update on what we are doing to be complaint with the GDPR.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Regulation that focuses on data protection and privacy for all individuals in the European Union, which goes into effect on friday May 25th, 2018. This regulation applies to all companies based in the European Union, but also any companies that processes data belonging to the EU citizens.

As such this regulation applies to Structum, the parent company of iKnode. We have many users which are European Citizens and this fact makes this regulation extremely important to us. At its most basic form the GDPR specifies how personal data should be collected, stored, protected and used. It is intended to put personal information control back in the hands of their owners.

We are committed to protecting and safeguarding your personal data and as part of this commitment, we have updated our Privacy Policy in preparation of the GDPR legislation. Due to the nature of our service, the iKnode family of services do not require changes to be GDPR compliant. There are no changes to the current settings of your account or how your information is processed.

The GDPR introduces the following user rights and how they are addressed:

• Customers can easily request access to their personal information.

  Request your personal information here.

• Customers can easily update their personal information to keep it up to that.

  All users can change their personal information using the iKnode Web Console, by clicking their name in the top right corner.

• Customer’s data can easily be removed once the information is no longer necessary.

  We have a removal policy of 30 days after a customer has cancelled their account with us.

• Customers can request the deletion of their data.

  Customers can request the deletion of their data before the 30 days policy is reached by requesting deletion here.

• Customers can easily request that their data be delivered to themselves or a third party.

  Request your personal information here.

There are 2 roles considered by the GDPR:

• Data Processor - Processes and Stores the data collected.
• Data Controller - Determines what and why data is collected.

Structum’s role when it refers to the iKnode family of services is a Data Processor. Developers hosting their apps on the iKnode Cloud are a Data Controller. Please review the GDPR Checklist to make sure you are GDPR compliant.

In order to help iKnode developers, we have added a data export feature that will allow you to extract data easily from iKnode to comply with your users right to request their information.

Query Console Export

As you can see in the picture above you can type a query on an specific collection and export the results as pure JSON, either by copying it to the clipboard, or by exporting it to a file.

This feature will come in handy when a user of your application requests the data you have collected. You can query by an specific user identifier, and export the data as JSON.

Data Storage Export

The other way to export your data is by exporting the full collection into JSON. This feature will come in handy if you store all of the data for a user or tenant in a collection. By clicking the “Export All” you will get a file with all of the documents in the collection.

If you have any questions and/or concerns regarding privacy, please do not hestiate to contact us at: privacy@structum.net

To learn more about the GDPR please visit the following sites:

• General Data Protection Regulation
• The GDPR check list
• GDPR Shield

In the wake of the revelation of the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL and the the posibilities for its exploitation to get certificate’s private key, we have been working around the clock to make sure we are fully secure.

This bug affects OpenSSL only and specifically versions 1.0.1f, 1.0.1e, 1.0.1d, 1.0.1c, 1.0.1b, 1.0.1a, 1.0.1 and it is currently patched in version 1.0.1g.

Our infrastructure has some nodes that use Linux but they are not exposed to the web, and do not contain our SSL certificates. Even so, we do use Rackspace’s and Amazon’s Load Balancers which as it turns out are vulnerable. Interestingly enough when we first setup our infrastructure we decided to host our certificates in our web server images, instead of using the SSL termination in the load balancer. Since our web application is .Net based it is also hosted on Windows on IIS. This means that we are not vulnerable at all.

We planned to move our certificates to the Load Balancer in order to ease our image deployments. After this event, we are rethinking that strategy. It is interesting that we were unaffected by this by pure luck, since we were in the process of moving our infrastructure to a new engine (which we will talk more about later), we were also configuring SSL termination in the load balancer.

As of right now, you have nothing to worry about while using iKnode. We are not affected bythis bug at all. It is still recommended that you change your password for iKnode Management console.

If you want to check other sites to see if they are vulnerable to the bug, you can use any of the following:

• Heartbleed test (filipo.io)
• LastPass Heartbleed test (lastpass.com)

It seems that our great friends at Cloudflare have identified that this bug doesn’t leak the private key. We’ll keep you updated as more information is revealed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We can be reached by using the Support console.

Today, I am happy to share the news that we have collaborated with the amazing team of Tim & Cyia from T.Cyia on their project WeTheAdorned.

WeTheAdorned is a members-only online jewelry platform which is curated by the famous “Sex And the City” star, Sarah Jessica Parker. This exclusive platform will allow T.Cyia’s bold designs to reach other parts of the world first hand and interface directly with the consumer, and it will also empower the subscriber to be able to acquire the stunning jewerly that was only available to Hollywood stars. For iKnode, this project allowed us once more to create seamless technology that powers creativity while placing the focus on the product and not the technology itself.

We were tasked with designing a launch page to measure interest, first by allowing people to subscribe to the newsletter and second by allowing people to signup for the service for a reduced price during launch. We chose HTML5 and Bootstrap for the front-end, and iKnode as the backend.

We built two applications: 1) One that manages the Newsletter subscriptions, and 2) one that manages the payments. For the Newsletter subscriptions we used the iKnode Package for MailChimp. We created a newsletter using MailChimp’s intuitive deisgner, and sent user subscriptions from the landing page all the way to mailchimp. In the case of payments we used the Stripe iKnode Package to signup and charge users for the service without us even worrying about storing credit card information on our servers or worrying aobut PCI compliance.

Using iKnode was not only a time saver in terms of development and maintenance, it was also an amazing platform for reliability and stability by handling high traffic peaks without being noticed. The iKnode cloud was able to handle approximately 10,000 requests per second on the highest traffic day.

We are very lucky to be able to work with Tim & Cyia in such a bold project. We are excited to see what is yet to come from this amazing duo and how technology will power one of the most creative profession of the world.