week03

Welcome back!

Come up and ask me questions for 5 mins :)

Stuff to mention

  • Analysis = do more than what you did in class and provide your actual opinions on topics.
  • Please let me know if you are going to submit late!
  • I am going to demo the SQLI thing now because I forgot.

What was in the lectures?

Core

  • Measurements and Estimations (thats kinda cool)
  • Entropy
    • What is good Entropy?
  • Passwords
    • What is good password epicness?
  • Social Engineering
    • Give me example

Engineering

  • Encryption
    • What are some examples?
  • Is all encryption epic?
    • Why not?

Houdini Abstract

It is the 1920s and you are the great Houdini!

Houdini hated so-called “mediums” taking advantage of grief-stricken people trying to contact loved ones who had died and successfully undertook a personal mission to expose mediums as being fakes.

However, Houdini (correctly) anticipated that after his own death it was quite likely that unscrupulous fake mediums would try to pretend his spirit was in touch with them, and they would claim that the dead Houdini was saying they were not fakes after all (!)

So, to forestall them, he publicly announced that he would try to contact his wife Bess via mediums after his own death, and then he privately worked out a protocol with her to prevent the mediums from claiming his “spirit” was telling them messages to pass onto Bess, when in fact they were just inventing the messages.

The purpose of the protocol was: to prevent mediums from cheating and successfully pass off false messages to Bess claiming they were from Houdini (after he had died) thus tricking the public and/or Bess

Sadly, Houdini’s actual protocol was flawed.

Not the abstract:

Jesse Link

Why is this related to cyber?

Lets look at some criteria

https://www.openlearning.com/unswcourses/courses/cyber-security-engineering-2025/logbook_information/?cl=1

Jesse goes to his lecture slides :)