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Current Projects
By Jeremy | November 15, 2008
Over the past few months I have been working hard in another semester of school. I have been implementing projects like a madman. I just wanted to highlight a few of the more interesting ones I have been working on this semester.
- Web Server – yep, that is correct. I now have my own threaded web server that actually works. It can handle all sorts of static pages, graphics, style sheets etc not to mention CGI. It can run any kind of cgi file you want to throw at it, including c or c++, perl. It even runs php with cgi-php. I have had tons of fun learning how to create a web server. It is one of those common things that I use every day and now I know the real internals.
- Operating System – this is another really exciting project because I use one of these every day and have always wondered why we even needed them. Now I have written my own terminal, scheduler, distributed mutual exclusion algorithm, virtual memory implementation and learned a little better how to use semaphores for not only mutual exclusion but also communication. This has been really enjoyable to me because now I finally understand why we need operating systems and why they are in the state they are in. There are some great challenges the computer science field has overcome to get us to the state where we are and there are so many more that if solved would make things much better.
- Old Unix Style Password Cracker – I really enjoyed this lab! We were given an old style Unix password file – no not the oldest ones that were in plaintext – that was encrypted using DES with a 12 bit salt. Our job was to take this file and get as many passwords as possible. I tried the most common ways of getting passwords: dictionary, substitution and brute force. Overall we were given 30 passwords and I cracked 19 in 3 or 4 days of trying. The fun part was running my cracker on 7 machines at once and seeing when I would get a new password. We have several other labs that look really fun in the future. Specifically, we are going to do a simple buffer overflow attack and get around some really simple DRM protection in a program. These were things I thought were the coolest thing as a kid and now I get to do them
Well, those are three of the really cool things I have been doing in my homework time this year. They have been really enjoyable and really fun. Not to mention the fact that I have learned loads of new stuff through doing them. Next semester is going to be really enjoyable as well!
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