Monday, March 10th

I learned something new about setting up SSH config files: it turns out the "Host" field needs to match, not "HostName".

I've been reading through the source code for the MD5 (Message Digest 5) algorithm, which has been quite fascinating.

I've also been learning how to use the tar command to compress files from the command line.

Friday, March 6th

Champaign. The temperature is getting warmer. In the morning, I spent some time polishing a web interface, learning that I can use a "div" with "flex" to push one other element to the bottom of its container.

I recycled four paper cartons, paper boxes, and plastic bottles. I'm grateful.

I have studied a bit about Cross-Site Request Forgery. I guess "iframe" is indeed a dangerous thing.

Wednesday, March 4th

Champaign. Today is a foggy day. The main task I have been working on today was the CS461 MP2 CP2. It's quite interesting to think about how to pass multiple filters and perform XSS. My previous learning of Base64 encoding and decoding leaves me with some critical intuition for solving the problem.

One of the SQL-injection problems is about finding the correct plaintext to generate a desirable MD5 hash digest. I have always wanted to try to design something to find reverse hashes for creating interesting usernames. From a high-level point of view, the most difficult part of this problem would be to find a fairly less-demanding SQL-injection string. I have spent a lot of time looking for things generating the traditional "1=1" thing from the course slides. Though not fruitful, adding an additional piece of code to parse the numbers and allow "X=X" is also quite interesting.