Archive for May, 2009

Cloud computing

Posted May 19, 2009 at 11:09 am in General | No Comments

I was reading an article titled “It’s Our Time” by Randy V. Sabett in this month’s ISSA Journal while drinking my morning cup of coffee when I came across a paragraph discussing the annual Cryptographers Panel at the most recent  RSA Conference held in San Francisco. Randy writes that the “annual Cryptographers Panel provided excellent insights, including Whit Diffie being ‘bullish’ on cloud computing and comparing it to the last game-changing technology (being radio).” This made me think for a moment about what exactly is cloud computing, why this would be a topic of discussion, and what connection security has to cloud computing.

So what is cloud computing? Wikipedia describes cloud computing as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them.” Wikipedia goes on to write “the term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.”

An excellent video from rPath explains cloud computing better than I would be able to with strictly text:

Continue reading..

Summertime, when the livin’s easy!

Posted May 15, 2009 at 6:43 pm in General | No Comments

The Spring 2009 school semester is over and let me be the first to say that I’m glad it is. The semester went relatively quick but the last two or three weeks I was becoming burnt out. I didn’t put as much time and effort into studying for finals as I should have and let’s hope this isn’t reflected in my grades!

The upcoming Fall semester has me somewhat excited. I am enrolled in the first core electrical engineering course which covers circuit laws and analysis, resistive circuits, energy storage, AC circuits and power, three-phase circuits, and computer-aided analysis. I’m also excited to be taking a course in computer networks. Hopefully my previous experience with networking is valuable to me in this course. My Network+ certification hasn’t yielded the benefits I was hoping for prior to becoming certified, partly due to the fact that many businesses aren’t looking for part-time help in networking or operations in this economy, so maybe I’ll be able to lean on this knowledge for my course.

There are two courses this fall that I am not looking forward to. The first is the second course in a two-course series in physics. This course will be interesting and relevant to my future studies but the work load involved with it will be enormous compared to the rest of my courses. I found out this past semester that physics dominated my study time far more than my other classes. Having learned this lesson the hard way I expect to be better prepared for the Fall semester. The second course I am not enthralled with is a course in engineering mathematics. I love math but I know that most of my time will be spent on physics and my electrical engineering course so I won’t have the necessary time to dedicate to this math class.

Regardless of my likes and dislikes for the upcoming Fall semester I will need to develop a strategy to better utilize my time. I would also like to work part-time somewhere that would be willing to let me work in the sysadmin realm or anything that involves infosec.

As far as my summer is concerned, I am enrolled in a summer class. I also hope to catch up on some reading, some car maintenance, some programming (Java), playing some tennis with Jordan, and hopefully moving somewhere closer to campus. I have been browsing Bruce Schneier’s website and glancing over a few of his papers. This paper in particular has my interest: Self-Study Course in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis. I will probably focus much of my technical reading on papers and books he has listed in this self-study paper.

Page 1 of 11