I will not be meeting with my mentor this week because he is on winter break.

Example Code:

void prepareForLauren ();
int main()

{

        // call function
        
        int time = 200;
        while (!isLaurenHere(time)) // (condition (argument))
        {
                
                prepareForLauren();
                time--;
        
        }

}

        bool isLaurenHere (int time) //definition, return boolean = true or false
{
        if (time == 0)
        return true;

        else
                return false;

}

void prepareForLauren () //void = return nothing
{

        cout << "Hey prepare for Lauren!" <<endl;
}

Yesterday I went to my internship and I learned a lot. I learned about the four different types of USB devices that are used as ways to do transfer information. They are HID, U3 smart drives, normal USB drives, and USB keyloggers. Sadly many of these things are difficult to use because there are now built in protection mechanism in peoples computers, from over use of these devices. Things such as autorun in USB drives and USB keyloggers are now gone or have warnings that pop-up that would identify the user. A way people get around this and a popular field is social engineering. Social engineering is basically tricking people into doing things they wouldn't normally do or want to do. For example, if you name a file and call it passwords many people will click on it and look through it. Social engineering takes advantage of human nature and curiosity. Today I also learned more coding. I learned how to use while, which is much like a for loop, only it does not use numbers. While learning to use a while statement I also learned about Boolean, which basically returns whether the condition is true or false. In the while statement I wrote, it returned a Boolean. I read a few articles on Windows programming (link found below).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff381398(v=vs.85).aspx

On November 14 I learned a lot. We went over various hacking techniques such as remote control of a computer via ssh, stack smashing, and format string attack. This was really interesting because I never knew you could control a computer from a different town or city. I got to practice hacking by stack smashing which has lots of different techniques. One way is to over flow the program by giving it too many characters. A quick way to type a certain number of characters is by using this format: perl -e 'print "A"x10'. I also learned about hexadecimal numbers which are based on 16 instead of the normal 10. Each character has a corresponding hexadecimal number. We can use this information when trying to smash the stack. I also learned some C++ coding. We went over arrays which assign a certain number of spaces that can be filled with characters. For example: int x[10]; has ten spaces for integers to fill. I also learned how to use a for loop. The format for a for loop looks like this: for(int i = 0;i<10;i++) . This example says that there is an integer x that is equal to zero. When i is less than 10 run through the commands below and add one to i. 

I went to my internship last week on Wednesday. It was great! My mentor Jeremy and I talked about a lot of different projects and areas of computer security. I decided that I want to create a "virus" that copies itself onto other computers.(It will not be used on computers connected to the Internet). I can't wait to start. While I was at my internship I started learning how to program. I learned how to make a box with text pop up on the screen and list the numbers from 1-100. I also made a text box that asked for a pin number and could tell whether it was correct or not. We went through various ways that people protect their programs from hackers, by hacking into the program I created. I learned the various ways for finding information such as strings and gdb. I've learned so much in just three hours. I can't wait to go back!

Yesterday was the first day of my science internship. It was great. I met Dr. Bulent, his Network Security group, and his Bio informatics group. When I met with the Network Security group they explained the difference between Malware and Internet security. We went over lots of possible projects that included  both building and breaking programs. I will learn a simpler programing language such as python and work towards writing a program. When I met with the Bio informatics group they explained how they were creating models so a computer can determine the difference between cancerous and healthy cells as accurately or better than a doctor. Their hope is to increase the number of accurate diagnoses. They are using graph theory to make these models. I am really looking forward to my next meeting, when I find out exactly what I will be doing.