# 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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/64882a467dd267b1aca50591/6b908732-49bd-4bf9-a43c-bc2bac324a89.png align="center")

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.