After what seemed like an eternity of a summer vacation, I'm (finally) back to school and hitting the books. My new roster of subjects includes a greatly-welcomed subject that tackles on information, the security of it, and security in general.
Although I was not able to take the COMSEC2 (Computer Security 2) class that my professor was offering, since he is the same professor for that class, I at least expect some topics to be covered from that class. I just hope that my time watching videos on YouTube about WannaCrypt/Wanna Cry, cryptography, and others will hopefully prove useful for this class.
And to an extent, it did. I was able to recite and give the correct answer several times when our professor asked us, so that's good for me, I guess.
For the first week, we learned about access controls, basic security threats, reasonings for security, the full basics of information security. We also got to do a small case study, for which we passed and the 3rd week of INFOSEC is almost upon us.
I have to pass an outline for our research paper, which is to be passed around midterms, and it covers one of my favorite topics: Bitcoin. Originally, we weren't able to get Bitcoin, but since no one was interested in the topic (aside from me), I picked it.
I wanted to choose Bitcoin as a topic because it's a very exciting thing in technology. It applies some cryptography for its regular transaction, which is why it's called a "cryptocurrency," and it has so many functions, vulnerabilities, and topics available. Just the videos of Computerphile alone is a more-than-good-enough basis for me to write my research paper on.
So, for the next few weeks or so, my team and I (well, mostly I) will do some research work behind Bitcoin. It's flaws, improvements, threats, and so on. I'm really excited and giddy about it because I can talk about some problems about it off the top of my head, such as how and if asset recovery services exist for Bitcoin, how the bitcoin blockchain is already the size of gigabytes, etc.
I'll do my best to write