Week 6: More Studying

At the beginning of this week, I made some finishing touches to our online entropy collection project. I made my script for the NIST Beacon source more dynamic. Since the source provides new random bytes every minute, I set up the script to identify the last timestamp it left off at and start collecting data from a minute after it. Later on, Amir told me that after running the cron job to collect data from online sources, there was an issue with the file naming. I had to rethink the algorithm I had made for run_all.py. By switching the steps where I moved the files from the tmp directory to daily_results and renamed the files, I was able to fix this problem.

I have been continuing my study of Python through the Lutz manual. I have found it to be an extremely powerful language because of its cross-platform system programming capabilities. The os and glob modules make automation of any command line algorithms trivial. Having Python as part of my skill set will make it much easier for me to write scripts moving forward.

After finding out about it through a friend, I enrolled for the Stanford online cryptography course, which begins on June 17^th. I feel that this course will expand my knowledge of cryptography beyond the basic concepts I learned in EECS 482. The course syllabus includes DES and AES block ciphers, collision resistant hashing, key derivation functions, Diffie-Hellman, RSA, and Merkle puzzles as well as several other topics.

On Friday, our team met with Professor Fu to discuss future work. We talked with Ari Juels about using subtle frequency variations in RFIDs to obtain randomness as well as thermal chamber testing. The first step is to order the RFIDs and with readers in order to begin testing. Those should take around a week to arrive to the lab. Until then, we will continue to focus on entropy available in desktop computers.