11/30/2015 Programming Contest

Programming Contest are not very different to Capture the Flag, as you know a CTF is a special kind of information security competitions where categories can be Web, Forensics, Crypto, Binary, or something else, The main Idea  is solve challenges, meanwhile Programming Contest is the same but here I can notice clearly an academic approach which includes mathematics , physics, statistics, data structures, and other topics that maybe I don't know yet, This entrance is to express How I feel in my first Programming Contest sponsored by RPC (Red de Programación Competitiva).

As always I was late at the event, starting at 1 p.m of 28 day of November, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira was the host of this competition, the idea of me participating in this contest was to know more about how it is,What kind of problems I need to face in the future, and the most important if it's funny because if you don't like this just quit out.

My team was conformed by two  more people Leiver a fellow class of the operations research and a new friend that certainly looked pretty smart Sebastian, both of them have a lot of experience in this kind of competitions, is obviously that a team is a conformation to speak also It was to generate synergy, new ideas, discuss problems, and share knowledge in how to solve this or that problem, but that did not happen here apparently I do not know many issues, nor have methods in mind I just could think myself in the problems and maybe share my thoughts, because that was the only thing that happened. To me this experiment was interesting because I'm confident with myself that I need to learn much more, and  increase my expertise in Computer programming, of course there is a goal behind this,and it needs to be part of my personal toolkit as a hacker.

Things that I learn :

If you're going to use c++ you can use this trick,

#include <bits/stdc++.h>

There is no need to include any other header files here and it's interesting because in stack overflow there is a question related to this :

How does #include <bits/stdc++.h> work in C++?: 

It is basically a header file that also includes every standard library and stl include file. The only purpose I can see for it would be for testing and education, please refer to https://gist.github.com/eduarc/6022859 to see an example, I don't exactly know if it's true that this increase the compilation time

trick  that didn't make sense to me was use:

#define fast ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false);cin.tie(NULL)

And It simply optimize cin and cout by making its execution faster, using a kind of syncronization; Off course participants in this competition like in the Ctf's Wargames, need to practice, practice, and practice to get a decent standard math and programming level, here we need to know what type of problem is, and based on that we can use one or other method, something funny to me was when the competition runs out of time everybody was talking about a DP, P,Complexity,Graphs, that was blowing my mind...Something new in this short weekend.

Stay tune !
Reference:
[1]Codeforces
[2]Competitive Programming
[3]Key Advantage of Competitive Programming
[4]PicoCTF: A Game-Based Computer Security Competitionfor High School Students
[1]Developing Small Team-based Cyber SecurityExercises 

11/28/2015 Linux Kernel, Security or Myth?

Recently I was reading an interesting interview who Craig Timberg made to Torvalds. Clearly the principal argument in the interview is the increase of known vulnerabilities in the linux Kernel and obviously the mindset of the lead developer of Linux, who is arguing that security is another concern more.

Even more broadly, the battle over Linux security is a fight over the future of the online world. At a time when leading computer scientists are debating whether the Internet is so broken that it needs to be replaced, the network is expanding faster than ever, layering flaw upon flaw in an ever-expanding web of insecurity. Perhaps the best hope for fixing this, some experts argue, lies in changing the operating system that — more than any other — controls these machines.

Kernel Security is pretty important right now and if you don't believe in that check the statistics in android's phone usage, also you can take a quick Look at a few recent kernel security holes that has been discovered Buffer Overflows, initialization failures and the list goes on. The point is that been Torvalds the king of geeks he is obviously going to be the king of the bad guys if they don't review properly commits and new patches, security is above usability or I think so, that's why Security of Linux even as it became a bigger is more important, but seriously Torvalds just said that People in security is just too paranoid.I remember when  long time ago Linux in its early days was widely considered a safer choice than Windows or other commercial operating systems, but now it has been disappear slowly. I have to say that not all problems did not involve the kernel itself, but they're there, and it's becoming a popular target for hackers building “botnets,” and the companies that sell them surveillance tools like Finfisher.

Could be The Kernel Security taking as a relevant topic ?

References:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/11/05/net-of-insecurity-the-kernel-of-the-argument/
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/661086/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/662627/
[4] http://bits-please.blogspot.com.co/2015/08/android-linux-kernel-privilege.html
[5] https://lwn.net/Articles/662219/