The first thing I worked on this week was collecting TCP
network packet arrival times. Fortunately, the tcpdump command line tool has an
extensive list of features that makes it very easy to obtain information on
network traffic. It dumps the originating IP, the target IP, the packet size,
and other bookkeeping information. If the –tt option is used, the timestamp of
the packet with microsecond granularity is recorded as well. Therefore, the
command:
sudo tcpdump -nntt | awk
'{print $1}' > packets.txt
logs the timestamps of packet arrivals in packets.txt
continuously until it is interrupted by the SIGINT or SIGTERM signals.
Alternately, the –c 100 option can be appended to print the first 100 packet
timestamps and then terminate.
For the rest of the week, I worked on getting up to speed on
Android development to work with Adam on identifying sources of entropy and
collecting random data from the mobile platform. There is a hefty amount of
work to set up the development environment. Once I was finished downloading the
Android SDK, the ADT plugin for Eclipse, the latest SDK tools, and the AVD (an
emulator for debugging apps), I was ready to start learning about project
organization, user interface principles, event listeners, Android Activities
and Intents, and a whole list of other basic Android development concepts.
Hopefully with a week of preparation, I will at least be able to do some basic
tasks on the platform. Fortunately, the Android developer’s site is very well
documented, making research for specialized projects easy.
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