My friends and followers have been asking me for updates. Overall, it was amazing term! I took 3 classes: Intro to Comp Security, Human Computer Interaction and Overview of Computer Security. All of them were interesting in terms of content and tough in terms of workload.

Intro to Comp Security is an undergraduate class that covers all key aspects of conventional computer security. We had awesome guest lectures from security experts of Sophos Labs, Fortinet, Telus and Deloitte. In our cool team project, we used Android Master Key Exploit for our attacks of popular Android apps. Final exam is coming soon, so I am busy now with refreshing the course’ material.

Human Computer Interaction design is a “design for human use”. It is a relatively new and very fascinating interdisciplinary field that aims to improve interaction between users and computers. After we’ve read some hilarious chapters of Normans’ book “The psychology of everyday things”, I added it into my reading list. Lectures and tutorials were interesting and fun to attend. During the term my team worked on improving of user interface for creating passwords in our department. IT department like one of our prototypes, so we are hoping it can be implemented soon.

Overview of Computer Security covers different subfields of computer security. We read and analyzed research papers from top security conferences. My favourit papers are “Chip and PIN is broken” and “Gone in 360 Seconds: Hijacking with Hitag2”. For our project, my teammate Primal and I worked on comparing password’s strengths for strict and weak password policies. We recently have submitted a report with our results.

Lesson learned – I have to improve my time management skill.

I am looking forward for vacation, new classes and choosing the research topic for my thesis.