At the halfway mark for this quarter, and at just over the halfway mark for this project, I would expect that anyone participating in a research project of any kind to have a considerable portion of their preliminary work done. In this case, I would expect to have my primary sources collected and analyzed as the outline and drafting tasks start to appear in the next couple weeks. Thankfully I have had no issues either gathering sources or analyzing them, and I feel ready to get started with the outlining process.
Specifically for this past week, most of my activities were simply reading through my gathered materials and analyzing them for use in the research paper. I have also spent some time brushing up on how hash functions work, both in general and in their specialized password cases (bringing up the nuances of the positive and negative impacts of speed and cost). I'm thankful that my mind mapping analysis showed that I needed to do some more research in this area because hashing has incredible impact in password authentication, its not as cut and dry as I thought it was initially.
The next two weeks I expect to have the outline and rough drafts completed, something that should be easily attainable.
A side note, one thing that came up in my research was hash collisions. Of course these have always been known to theoretically exist for all hashing algorithms out there, but actual examples of it have been hard to find until recently, especially for the more secure algorithms (MD5 has had known collisions for over a decade now). In a shocking reveal earlier this year, a group of researchers developed a method that allowed them to generate two PDF documents with the same SHA1 hash. Clever manipulations of the documents colors and images coupled with the use of server farms to distribute the task has shown that SHA1 has serious weaknesses in the face of modern technology.
Check out shattered.io for more information about this particular attack.
No comments:
Post a Comment