Week 1 Sptember 10, 2010

We have an enthusiastic and bright students on our first meeting for the fall semester in JEC 3117. We have had a few new faces and glad to have a few returning veterans. Most of the students have chosen their projects - some are their own, some are continuing with their projects, some are choosing to work on HFOSS, some on Open Government and soem to help with local community.

As usual, my plea is to request the students to update the dashboard (right only two projects are on line).

We had two guest speakers the first week:

1) David Dora
2) Alex Rodacea

David is a graduate student at ECSE department (he got his BS from RPI) and he talked about open content. His pleas is to contribute to Open Book project (specifically 50 to 60 pages book) with explicit idea, outline, details and examples. His talks slides may be found here.



Alex's general theme was reverse engineering. In particular, Alex talked about his summer exploits (with his two team members (one from Germany and one from Korea)) winning $10000 in a Security Contetsts conducted in connection with a security conference in Montreal Canada in 2010. Alex gave an over all summary of his his exploits and he had a few specific slides. He talked about the two common security holes in Software (namely comparison with signed numbers and with initialized variables). He gave clever examples of these kinds of mistakes and how people exploit these.

Alex is willing to chat with anyone about these problems. His slides may be found here.
Alex's slides