Thursday, February 28, 2013

Today I went to my internship and we talked about types of places someone can work for in computer security. One think that I thought was really interesting was how everyone has flex hours, which means you decide what hours during the day you work, as long as you put in the number of hours needed. You can also work from home, which is another perk. Here is a list of various branches of work:






The other part of the day was spent working on creating ciphers. Today I made a shift cipher. A shift cipher converts the text input into numbers (ascii table). We then add "key" (which is a number you establish in the beginning of the program) to the converted number which changes the letter the number now represents. Because of this when you print the message to the screen it is no longer decipherable. Below is an example:

Shift Cipher: white is python code, black is the command line that runs the program

3 comments:

  1. Who knew that your internship could open up so many career opportunities! If you are at all interested in this kind of thing, keep talking about it with your mentors, and stay in touch after you finish. I am sure that you could make good use of it in a job hunt.

    Thanks for the screen shot. It add quite a bit to your description of the day's work.

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  2. Have your mentors talked at all about the US Army's Cyber Command? There is a big initiative in the government right now to train and recruit "cyber-warriors". Seems like a field with amazing career options right now!

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  3. We didn't talk about them specifically, but it sounds interesting.

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