COMP715/815GB:2013 Gold Team


 * Home
 * A Team (Robert)
 * [Gold Team (Daniel)]
 * Team One (James)
 * Team Memorable (Gabriel)

Info

 * Planned Meeting Times:
 * Wednesday 8:30pm - 9:30pm


 * Group leader:
 * Daniel
 * Students:
 * Eben
 * Jared
 * Melissa B
 * Arwa
 * Valerie
 * Daniel
 * Colby moved here from Team Memorable

Week of Sept 11th
Meeting Time/Location: 9/11/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

Agenda: - Introduction; - Communication preferences/Group Dynamics; - Intro do Cryptography Video; - Other topics;

During the first meeting, the group members introduced themselves and talked briefly about their backgrounds, areas of expertise and past experiences related to the class. It was also used to discuss about the group communication "policy" and preferred methods. It was suggested the creation of a Google Group to facilitate communications.

I showed the students a video I found on You Tube about cryptography and suggested that the students watch the other videos from the same professor. The video is actually a class taught by prof. Dan Boneh, from Stanford University and it can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t1oCt88XJk

Week of Sept 18th
Meeting Time/Location: 9/18/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

Agenda: - Review of IntegerDivision exercise: all students were comfortable with the exercise and none showed any concern with this topic;

- Programming/Coding in JavaScript: the group discussed briefly about the programming issue, more specifically with the password problem, i.e., how to convert a string to numeric value and avoid the "checksum" issue. As discussed in classroom, the checksum method would generate the same value for passwords "abc" or "cba" due to the commutative property of addition. None of the students were familiar with hashing. It was agreed that the group members would try to find material on the Internet about hashing and share with the other members;

- Homework 1: The group went over homework 1, discussing the understanding of each question. Two main issues were raised: 1) The group wasn't sure what was the goal of question #3 (Locate three sites on the internet that deal with web security). After some discussions, we agreed the question was asking about sites that provide web security services. But we decided to seek further clarification from prof. Jonas.

2) The group members are showing willingness to collaborate with each other. However, there are some concerns with the issue of collaborating with team-members and still completing the assignments individually. I explained that as long as the collaboration is not specifically targeted to one question and no programming code is shared, collaboration should be allowed. However, answers to specific questions or programming code should NOT be shared. I will email prof. Jonas to confirm this understanding.

Week of Oct 2nd
Meeting Time/Location: 10/02/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

- The group engaged in a very intense conversation when discussing question #2 (bike lock). Several of the team members participated actively, going to the board and explaining their understanding and approach to the problem.

Week of Oct 9th
Meeting Time/Location: 10/09/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

- The group went over the homework that was delivered before today's class. More specifically, the group focused on the following questions:

i) Question #1: Lock bumping; ii) Lab section: we spent the rest of the time discussing the lab portion of the homework. Daniel C. showed us good websites for learning JavaScript (such as Codecademy.com). He also showed us some nice features in Google Chrome to make it easier to debug our code. Eben also contributed effectively and presented a better code editor than Notepad ++.

Week of Oct 16th
Meeting Time/Location: Saturday (10/19) at 2pm - UNH Manchester Library and; Tuesday (10/22) at 5:30pm - Pandora Building.

- Due to conflict in the schedule of several members, the group tried to meet in alternative days. Two days were proposed: Saturday, October 19th and Tuesday, October 22. On Saturday, only Melissa showed up and it was a very productive meeting. It lasted three hours and we went over the homework #3. Melissa and I downloaded and installed WireShark and analyzed the packets that were being captured by the software. We also downloaded and installed ZenMap, which is a port scanner software.

On Tuesday, October 22, again only one student was able to attend. Eben and I reviewed a few topics that would be covered on the midterm exam.

Week of Oct 23rd
There was no meeting due to the midterm exam.

Week of Oct 30th
Meeting Time/Location: 11/05/13 5:00PM/Group Study room @ UNHM Library.

The class was dismissed earlier due to the RedSox game (World Series Final). We tried to schedule alternative times so that the students could meet.

I held two study group sections in order to accommodate students' schedules. The first meeting was scheduled for Saturday, November 2nd, but no one, except for Melissa, was able to attend. So I canceled it as Melissa could also attend the other one scheduled for Tuesday at 5pm.

On Tuesday, Nov. 5th, Melissa and I met in the group study room in the library to go over the password hunt. We researched about Regular Expressions and implemented a few examples in JavaScript. The meeting lasted for about an hour.

Week of Nov 6th
Meeting Time/Location: 11/06/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

The group met after class to discuss the password hunt homework. We first discussed about which strategies might be successful on this exercise. Some ideas were: dictionary attack, regular expressions, and creating more robust application and linking it to a database (Colby).

The focus then was on regular expressions as it seemed to be the strategy that would be used by most of the team members. The following resources were shared by Daniel Castrillon and were considered very helpful: and

Week of Nov 13th
Meeting Time/Location: 11/13/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

The group met after class to discuss the approach to homework #5 (Veni, Vidi, Vici). The group took a first look at the encrypted text, analyzed the frequency of the characters in the text and attempted a few "translations" using the analyze.html code provided.

A few students were more engaged and decided to analyze the data in Excel and exchange information on some useful Excel functions that should help when parsing the data and organizing the text in a spreadsheet.

Week of Nov 20th
Meeting Time/Location: 11/20/13 8:30PM/Computer Lab.

The group continued to discuss homework #5 (Veni, Vidi, Vici). No one had successfully decrypted the hidden text yet. The group brainstormed about some topics: if the offset was fixed (linear) or not. For example, the character that appears most frequently in the hidden text is "G" (capital G, asc code 71). We suspected it was replacing " " (space, asc code 32). However, the same offset did not work for the rest of the characters. Some students believed there was a relationship between the asc code and the offset used. Other possibility is that the code has a few offsets based on the interval of the character asc code (Capital letters are offset by a number, special characters by a different one, numbers by a third offset and lower case letters by a fourth offset value).

There was no consensus on what would be the best way to decrypt the hidden text. Three possibilities were discussed: 1) do everything in Excel; 2) develop a code in JavaScrip that would decrypt the hidden text using the same approach used in previous homeworks; 3) trial and error - start replacing the most frequent characters with the most frequent letters in English words and see if words or part of the text can be revealed. After some chunks of the text become readable, start replacing characters that "makes sense."

Week of Nov 27th
No meeting due to Thanksgiving

Week of Dec 4th
Final Exam - No meeting

Some of the group members, however, exchanged emails on the week of the exam and discussed topics covered in chapters 5, 6 and 7 that might be on the exam.