My Academic Journey

 During my first term at the DMUIC I have learnt a lot of new essential skills. The Computer Skills and Research module has helped me a lot, and in this post I am going to conclude what I have learnt during the work on the project and the blog. Firstly, I have learnt how to find, filter and reference academic sources. Moreover, I have implemented this knowledge in my studying. Also, I learnt how to use university facilities such as library. It is a new and essential skill which I am glad to have. Secondly, I have learnt how to manage the project. For example, there are a project plan and a Gannt Chart in my blog. These elements help to manage project well. Moreover, they provide me with the possibility to assess my work and to decide wether I am working efficiently or not. Thirdly, I have learnt how to write research essays and how to find correct sources for referencing. These new skills were implemented in the research essay post. Moreover, I have learnt how to use some essential...

Take-a-tale - honeyword generation technique, where a tail is added to the password. A number of passwords with same body, but with different tails are created (Juels and Rivest, 2013).    (Author's work) I have decided to research this technique further and to write a python program that demonstrates how it works and how honeywords are supposed to work in general. The file take_a_tail.py is available for everyone on my google drive: link I have also written a .bat file which starts a program and writes basic information about it: User can enter 4 commands: register - to register a new user in a system login - to try to log in into the system attack - prints a list of user with passwords stop - stops program First of all we need to register a new user: After entering a new username and a password, user is asked to add 3 numbers after password. This 3 numbers are a tail. After registration his username and password are contained in memory with additional 5 honeywords - decoy pa...

In the following blogpost the way I used software called hashcat in my project is described. The example of using this software for dictionary attack is demonstrated. In my work I used information provided by Tavarez (2020) .   According to Porup (2020) hashcat is one of the most popular password crackers all around the world. Moreover, hashcat is included in the list of basic tools in Kali linux – linux distribution widely used by cybersecurity specialists. I installed Kali linux virtual machine in order to use this program and to show the example of a dictionary attack (Author's screenshot) However, before looking at the examples of using hashcat on practise, it is useful to understand in which areas hashcat is using. In plain words, hashcat is a password guesser which includes a number of features and pre-installed functionalities for cracking passwords by penetrating brute-force and dictionary attacks. The way it works is not too sophisticated, it hashes considerable numbe...

The glossary post with the most important terms included in my research. Correct understanding of the terms below is necessary for understanding most of the posts in the blog:   Hash – output of complex mathematical formula. Often used to store passwords and to check integrity of data  (Evans, 2018) Honeyword – decoy password used to trigger an alarm and to detect password cracking (Juels and Rivest, 2013) Salting – process of making hash more complex and secure (Bošnjak and Brumen, 2019) Brute-force attack – manual attack or attack with the use of password guessing software in order to guess the password. May be offline and online. Offline attack is executed on a password hash in order to guess the password which has same hashing output as provided. Online attack is usually, but not always, manual and connected with trying most common passwords on some particular service in order to get access to an account  (Evans, 2018) Dictionary attack – an example...