This video explains encryption and public keys with simple but to the point animation. It uses a mailbox analogy to explains public keys. It really helped me understand the difference between public keys and private keys and their functions.
This video tells us about virus, DDOS, and phishing. It also explains that actually 90% of the time a system gets hacked is not because of security bug, but it’s because of simple mistakes made by human itself.
Not all hackers are bad guys. This video tells us that there are people known as Black Hats, cybercriminals who has bad intentions, and White Hats, the good people who hunt for bugs, close security holes, and perform security evaluations for companies. This video also tells us about commons cyber attacks such as Phishing, Trojan Horses, and Code Injections. It’s also interesting how they concludes that most likely, the war that we currently and will be facing is cyberwarfare.
This article clarifies some wrong stereotypes regarding OS security such as “Linux is the most secure because its open source” and “Windows is the least secure because of its install base”. At the end, this article concludes that every OS has its vulnerabilities and its likely that your network contains a mixture of operating systems and a mixture of vulnerabilities. Thus, your operating system can’t define its secureness.
In this video, Tom explains about what is hashing algorithm and why we use it. One of the reason why we use Hashing algorithm is to identifying files. I found it interesting when he tells us that hashing algorithm can be broken and MD5 hash algorithm is already considered broken because of its collisions.
This link answers my question regarding “How broken MD5 is?”. It explains that MD5 is thoroughly broken with regards to collisions, but not for preimages or second-preimages. But either way, MD5 is still not recommended because it’s unsalted and very fast (which is very bad for password hashing function).
This video is like an introduction about how SHA generate seemingly random hash strings. SHA will do many loops while updating the hash until it run out of the messages. The loop mustn’t be too quick since it’s easy to break.
There are so many type of SHA; SHA-1, SHA-2, and SHA-3 which is still pretty uncommon. SHA-1 is a 160-bit hash meanwhile SHA-2 is actually a family of hashes and comes in a variety of lengths, the most popular being is a 256-bit. These “successors” are made to replace the previous SHA when it’s considered broken for collisions.
This week, I kind of struggled on understanding the concept of pointer in C language. This website taught me the basic of pointers in C. It also states that C programming tasks are performed more easily with pointers and other tasks, such as dynamic memory allocation, cannot be performed without using pointers.
Even though I’ve finally understand the basic of pointer, I still can’t understand what actually happened when we pass pointer(s) to a function. This website tells us that if we pass a pointer as an argument (instead of a variable), then the address of the variable is passed instead of the value. So, any change made by the function using the pointer is permanently made at the address of passed variable. That kind of passing is called “pass by reference”.