CS 458
Computer Security and Privacy
Computer Security and Privacy opened my eyes to many of the weaknesses of computer systems. The course also gave the opportunity to interact with these concepts through assignments.
For one of the assignments the student was required to hack into a system using different approaches including buffer overflow and string format. I understood the basic concept of these approaches, but when implementing them I did not ‘calculate’ my solution effectively. This resulted in a lot of wasted time through blindly brute forcing my solution. I learned a good lesson that sometimes it is best to do extensive planning compared to minimal. This sounds like a very basic lesson, but in the context of CS school assignments this was rarely necessary as they were often very straightforward (Excuses, excuses, excuses….I know).