Week 3 - Journal

• How did you select your research topic? What resources did you use, which selection criteria did you follow?

Reflecting on my earlier posts and my general thought process about this project over the past few weeks, I'll address how and why I chose the topic I did. To start, computer security has interested me ever since I knew of its existence, the cool factor for it is fairly high (in my opinion). I try to direct all of me school assignments in the general direction of security whenever I get the chance because it's something that genuinely interests enough that I've spent my own time browsing resources and delving into the world. Our whole world is integrating itself with computers and the internet, so its security has to be one of the most important issues facing the world today, the stakes for failure will only get higher.

Beyond simply wanting to do something with computer security (as I stated on the first day of my class), I needed to focus it down into something that would be interesting for the class, translate into a research paper well, and also enhance my understanding of computer security. Because this topic is generally high profile among the tech world, I was never worried that I would paint myself into a corner and choose something that didn't have a wealth of supporting information out there. Being free to choose what I wanted made the whole process so much smoother that previous projects that I've worked on (and those being much smaller than this one).

Videos like this one are what cemented my idea to research password authentication.