February 20th, 2009 chris
The last few times around we’ve been talking about performance. Extreme performance. We’ve talked about how fast the Google File System is, how fast MapReduce is, and how fast BigTable is. Yet all three rely on a common service we hinted upon last time, a lock service (amongst other things) named Chubby, the topic of today’s discussion. Chubby doesn’t bill itself as high performance like the other services we’ve mentioned, but is designed with high availability in mind. Let’s dive in further and see what exactly makes up Chubby and why it’s so special in the Google world.
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December 11th, 2008 chris
It’s pretty rare that I find a good programming language-video game metaphor, but after a bit of thinking, I think I’ve got something. For me, it’s a natural match between the C programming language (and C++) and Fallout 3′s Fat Man, a “tactical nuclear catapult”. They’re both super-powerful and exceedingly dangerous to your health if not used correctly.
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December 8th, 2008 chris
Now that finals are over I can FINALLY return to writing like I promised you all a billion times. With that in mind, let’s look at a book I picked up for my security class, Exploiting Software: How to Break Code. But does the book hold up to the badass name behind it?
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November 2nd, 2008 chris
Sorry about the incredible lack of posting lately. Have had too much time drained by a particularly nasty homework assignment. Now that it’s out of the way, I will hopefully return to the ‘regular’ posting schedule until the next vicious assignment comes up. For you masochists at home who have 20 hours to spare, here’s the specs for it from my teacher’s site:
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October 1st, 2008 chris
While reading new books for my security class, I stumbled upon a very well-thoughtout, well-explained article on how buffer overflows / stack overflows work. It’s got cool nerdy pictures and code along with it. And the best part is…it’s got assembly code! Yay! How long has it been since you’ve seen assembly code? Have you actually seen assembly code?
Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit by Aleph One
Back in my undergrad days they taught us about the fun times of Pep/7, a language similar to assembly used to teach…assembly. It turns out to be surprisingly similar to x86, and once you know one you end up with a great handle on the other. But it seems there are not any links to it from Google, so you’re on your own if you want to dig it up and use it.
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September 29th, 2008 chris
In having to research libnet and libpcap, I’ve found that there aren’t really a whole lot of great resources on them. But for those who, like me a week ago, have no idea what these things are, some clarification is helpful. Libnet is the standard packet construction library for C, which can be used to make TCP and UDP packets, amongst others. Libpcap does the opposite: it captures packets off the network. And now that you know the tools I need to pick up in a short amount of time, let’s talk about the resources I eventually found.
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