Top 10 List of Week 02

This week’s topic is about Security, Protection, and Privacy. That’s why I’ve been mainly browsing for links that are related to this topic. These are my findings, in no particular order~

1. Beginners Guide to Internet Safety & Privacy
   A guide about privacy for dummies. Since this week’s topic circles around security, protection, and privacy, I thought this link I got from the slides was an interesting read. Most people are probably aware of the tips this article offered, but a lot of them never give it a second thought. It’s important to keep our privacy on the internet, that’s why this is a very educating read.

2. Privacy Issues in Productivity Apps
   The video talks about how Notion, one of the biggest growing productivity app lately, is in fact unsafe. I’ve been using Notion for a while, and it was a bit surprising that it has a big issue with user data privacy. This app doesn’t support end-to-end encryption, which means the App can have access to my data, making it more vulnerable to attacks.

3. How Bitcoins Work
   Bitcoins work on block chains, which involve a lot of security measures to keep it going. This video talks about the main ideas of the inner-workings of bitcoins. It explains a little bit about everything, including digital signatures, decentralization, proof of work, and something about ledger. I’m fascinated by bitcoins and this video gave me more insight about how it came to be.

4. 256 Bit Security
   This video was mentioned several times on the previous video (link number 03). It talks about how secure is a 256 bit security, and how many possible guess it takes to figure out one particular string with 256 bit in length. What’s interesting is, even if we have a Giga Galactic Super Computer (as he said it) guessing numbers for as long as 37 times the age of the universe, we would still only have 1 in 4 billion chance of success in finding the correct guess.

5. Difference Between Private and Public Key
   Private key is used for both encryption and decryption, and it’s faster than public key’s cryptography. Whilst public key uses two keys, one for encryption and the other for decryption. I’ve been fascinated with cryptography since primary school because it seemed so cool. Knowing more about the difference in these keys was insightful. Now I know that there’s symmetrical and asymmetrical cryptography. It’s very interesting.

6. SHA-1 Checksums
   It’s a very short entry about what SHA-1 checksums is all about. It provides assurance that a downloaded document hasn’t been modified and is an original. Matching checksum means that the document hasn’t been tampered with. I haven’t learned about why this is useful yet, but it’s one thing good to know about.

7. About Checksum
   Since I’m still curious about checksums and their usage, I continued to GSGS about this. Continuing from the previous link, checksum turns out to be a sequence of numbers and letters used to check data for errors. For example, the file may not have been properly downloaded due to issues on the network or hard drive, causing corruption on the file. Corrupted file is never wanted, that’s why the checksum can be used to make sure that our copy is identical to the one we meant to download.

8. SHAttered, the SHA-1 Collision Attacks
   Continuing on my SHA and checksum journey, I found this catchy looking keyword SHAttered. It turns out to be the first real-world collision attack. The main problem was that the hash wasn’t actually unique. This means that a malicious file can diguise as something that can be trusted by having an identical hash to that of the trusted one. Finding matching hashes within two files is called a collision attack. On 2017, Google announced SHAttered, the first-ever crafted collision for SHA-1. It’s a very interesting read with a very catchy title.

9. Password Managers
   This article discusses about password managers, mainly how password managers secure passwords and risks of using it. Password managers uses encryption to protect passwords. But, even if it’s safe, it’s still like having all your eggs in one basket. Most of the risks of using password manager comes from the user’s behavior. I’ve used password manager for a while now, and it’s quite handy because I don’t have to remember my passwords while having it very secure with special characters like @ or !.

10. Two-Factor Authentication
    More on authentication, I’m familiar with 2FA for a while, but this article gives a very detailed explanation about it. It shows how having 2FA alongside our password makes them that much more secure, because it involves a second factor that’s required to authenticate someone. The second factor could come from something we know (like a keystroke pattern), something we have (like a smartphone), or something we are (biometric patterns like fingerprints, iris scan, or voice print).

That’s all for my security, protection and privacy journey this week. I hope these links will be useful to anyone who chooses to click on them.

Have a great week, see you on the next one~