CT Data Sets
Connecticut Secretary of State:
- Concord - (Records showing the formation of and fundamental changes to corporations,
LLCs, partnerships, and other businesses)
- Business Filings Look-Up
- UCC Liens Look-Up - (Personal property liens)
-
Connecticut Business
Registration Data Portal
Connecticut Court Records
Connecticut Judicial Branch:
Healthcare Professionals
Connecticut Department of Public Health:
-
Physician Profile - (Background information, including felonies & disciplinary actions)
- Final Disciplinary Orders
(included in License Lookup)
- Health Care or Environmental Health Professional's License Status - (Includes dentists, chiropractors, and many more professions)
-
Verify Health License (Department of Public Health)
License Verification
Connecticut License Lookup:
License
Verification - Find license status for companies, individuals, and
business entities under the authority of the Department of Public Health and the Department of Consumer Protection,
including medical professionals, home improvement contractors, new home contractors, real estate
professionals, and individuals engaged in other trades and occupations.
Financial and Banking Licenses
Connecticut Department of Banking:
Verify a License
- Information regarding licenses for consumer collection agencies, mortgage
brokers and lenders, check cashers, debt adjusters, and others in the
financial industry.
Prisoner Lookup
Connecticut Department of Correction:
Offender Information - Information regarding offenders currently
incarcerated with the Connecticut Department of Correction.
Federal Bureau of Prisons:
Inmate Locator - Locate federal inmates from 1982 to present.
Sex Offender Look-Up
Connecticut Department of Public Safety:
Sex Offender Registry - Information regarding offenders who have been
convicted or found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
U.S. Department. of Justice:
National Sex Offender Website
Frequently Requested Links:
Other Useful Links:
SSH Overview
The most common way of connecting to a remote Linux server is through SSH. SSH stands for Secure Shell and provides a safe and secure way of executing commands, making changes, and configuring services remotely. When you connect through SSH, you log in using an account that exists on the remote server.
How SSH Works
When you connect through SSH, you will be dropped into a shell session, which is a text-based interface where you can interact with your server. For the duration of your SSH session, any commands that you type into your local terminal are sent through an encrypted SSH tunnel and executed on your server.
The SSH connection is implemented using a client-server model. This means that for an SSH connection to be established, the remote machine must be running a piece of software called an SSH daemon. This software listens for connections on a specific network port, authenticates connection requests, and spawns the appropriate environment if the user provides the correct credentials.
The user’s computer must have an SSH client. This is a piece of software that knows how to communicate using the SSH protocol and can be given information about the remote host to connect to, the username to use, and the credentials that should be passed to authenticate. The client can also specify certain details about the connection type they would like to establish.
How SSH Authenticates Users
Clients generally authenticate either using passwords (less secure and not recommended) or SSH keys, which are very secure.
Password logins are encrypted and are easy to understand for new users. However, automated bots and malicious users will often repeatedly try to authenticate to accounts that allow password-based logins, which can lead to security compromises. For this reason, we recommend always setting up SSH key-based authentication for most configurations.
SSH keys are a matching set of cryptographic keys which can be used for authentication. Each set contains a public and a private key. The public key can be shared freely without concern, while the private key must be vigilantly guarded and never exposed to anyone.
To authenticate using SSH keys, a user must have an SSH key pair on their local computer. On the remote server, the public key must be copied to a file within the user’s home directory at ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This file contains a list of public keys, one-per-line, that are authorized to log into this account.
When a client connects to the host, wishing to use SSH key authentication, it will inform the server of this intent and will tell the server which public key to use. The server then check its authorized_keys file for the public key, generate a random string and encrypts it using the public key. This encrypted message can only be decrypted with the associated private key. The server will send this encrypted message to the client to test whether they actually have the associated private key.
Upon receipt of this message, the client will decrypt it using the private key and combine the random string that is revealed with a previously negotiated session ID. It then generates an MD5 hash of this value and transmits it back to the server. The server already had the original message and the session ID, so it can compare an MD5 hash generated by those values and determine that the client must have the private key.