Week 2: Cryptography, Git & GitHub
Week 2 is done, and I'm glad I could achieve all the goals set for this week. Let's get into how the week went.
What I Did
I finished the remaining modules of the Coursera Applied Cryptography course, concluding the course. I also started learning Git through Learn Git Branching and GitHub Skills.
On the home lab side, I set up Metasploitable 2, Docker, Juice Shop, and DVWA.
What I Learned
Modules 4, 5, and 6 of the Applied Cryptography course covered:
IP Protection, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and how cryptography can be used to implement them
Key management and lifecycle and their effects on security properties
Blockchain Cryptography and its influence on smart contracts, access control, and coding
Information Lifecycle and how each stage interconnects
Homomorphic Encryption and Post-Quantum Cryptography and how they can influence information confidentiality
I really enjoyed learning about blockchain cryptography and the idea behind the name. It was interesting to finally gain in-depth knowledge of what blockchain means and how it works.
Above all, I'm all done with the Applied Cryptography course. I will be moving on to the next week with one new certificate added to my resume and a good expanse of knowledge to keep building on.
On the Git end, at first it was confusing, and I had a pretty difficult time understanding the syntax, but the visualization on Learn Git Branching helped. Then I took the Introduction to Git skill training on GitHub Skills, and it helped a lot, putting the syntax learnt into practice. Now I can confidently make commits, create branches, and merge branches.
What Didn't Go to Plan
The weekend lab was the most eventful of the week. A simple task of setting up Metasploitable 2, Juice Shop, and DVWA ended up crashing my Kali VM when I ran out of disk space.
A simple day meant for routine setup turned into a full-on Linux disk management crash course. After Kali crashed, I had to figure out if it was the entire VM or just some part, and that alone took a long time. Eventually I got to the point of realizing that it was a disk space problem. I had to clear space, then resize the disk space from the initial 24GB to 50Gb to contain the tools I wanted to install. It took a while to fully resolve, and I had to reinstall and re-pull the Juice Shop and DVWA images after increasing the disk size.
What's Next
Moving on to Week 3 with Bash Scripting, Docker fundamentals and running Nmap scans and Burp Suite assessments on vulnerable targets in the home lab.
