NirusLaboratories
E2Test chambers
ACTIVE 11/ 16

The reception desk

Test chamber 11. Please report to reception.

The reception desk

The home website holds 65 small projects, some of them rather old. In front of all of them stands a reception desk: a small PHP program that checks on every single request whether the page is public or needs a login. Only then may you pass.

Projects behind the desk65
Public3
Login only62
LicenceMIT
LoginPasskey

Counted on 10 November 2026, straight from the portal.

Experimental setup

  1. 01
    Everything goes through one door. Every request to the website, every picture and every download too, first lands at the portal. It checks, and only then does it deliver.
  2. 02
    Closed by default. Anything new is private. A page only becomes public once it is released with a click.
  3. 03
    Everyone sees only their own. Whoever has an account sees only the projects released for that account. A new account sees nothing at all at first.
  4. 04
    Signing in with a passkey. Since November 2026 the login runs through Pocket ID, like everywhere in the lab. There is no password form any more.
  5. 05
    Old code lives on. Some projects date back to the PHP 5 days. The portal translates the old database commands so they still run today, and marks such pages with a red “OLD CODE” notice.

Why?

The old projects were not supposed to simply vanish, but they were not supposed to stand openly on the internet either. Instead of securing each one separately, they got a reception desk together.

There are plenty of ready-made solutions, but they usually bring a framework and a lot of dependencies. This portal is plain PHP and runs on any ordinary web server.

Test result

Operational. Whoever wants to reach the home website cannot get past reception. Not through the back entrance either.

Code of the portal