Kat's Blog

I chose this Website Security Research project because of my interest in Cybersecurity. I wanted more hands-on experience with a real web application and this project fit that description perfectly.

I believe working on this project has met my expectations and goals. My partner and I have been learning a lot about security through our own research and implementing various security measures on the website. We’ve also gained experience with tools and technologies that are essential in the cybersecurity field, like using different penetration testing tools and learning to work with various security frameworks. All of which would likely not have been done without our involvement in this project.

My favorite “technology” I’ve used so far in this project is Burp Suite. I’ve used this technology to help with Juice Shop’s hacking challenges and it’s been very fun to use. It makes it easy to intercept and change requests, which has helped me understand how different attacks work. I’ve mainly been using the repeater and intruder features.

My least favorite “technologies” have been Kali Linux through the UTM virtual machine and imovie. Funnily enough, those are two very different technologies. I haven’t been able to figure out how to run Kali Linux on my Macbook, only my computer. This is annoying when I am not at home and want to work on something. I will eventually need to figure out how to get it to work, but I haven’t yet. And I don’t enjoy using imove because I don’t like editing videos. I unfortunately need to use it because when I record my progress report videos I am constantly messing up or needing to restart, so editing helps me make my video without a million retakes.

So for this blog post, I decided to look back at some of my own code. Below is a snippet from my CS 161 final assignment. I found a lot of code that could’ve been “cleaner” but the most obvious example is the unnecessary global variables. I also found a lot of redundancies and the readability isn’t great.

I’d like to think I’ve improved since my freshman year, but I know there’s always room for improvement. Looking at the provided readings serves as a good reminder for practices that should always be in the back of my mind while working. If I could go back in time I’d tell myself that I need to keep working on avoiding redundant code by refactoring repeated parts into reusable functions. It’s something I still tend to overlook when I’m rushing to get things done, but I know it would make my code cleaner and easier to work with. I’d also tell myself that I really need to stop using global variables so much. They seem convenient, but they actually make things harder to test and understand later. I need to get better at passing information into functions the right way to make my code more organized and professional.

My project is going well. There was a bit of discourse this week between my teammates over the website we need for our project. While it was a difficult conversation we ended up coming to a compromise where both parties are happy with the outcome. On the bright side, our project progress has been steadily increasing and my teammates are very skilled, capable, and productive.

So far this course has been really fun and insightful. With this project, I have the opportunity to explore my specific interests in more depth. I am glad that I am working on this project while also taking Intro to Security since there’s a LOT of overlap.

My team and I have been making good progress and have been pretty efficient communicators. We are able to have weekly team meetings over Discord as well as chat in between meetings. They are helpful and I find that we all contribute to our project and there is no one person lagging behind. One challenge we face currently is finding a good time each week for our synchronous meetings. Usually, there’s a time slot every Thursday evening that we are able to meet, however, sometimes people cannot make it or have to come late (myself included). We have been good about giving that warning in advance, and usually, we are able to reschedule or take notes for the missing person. So thankfully we’ve been able to navigate through our roadblocks thus far!

Introduction

My name is Katalina Nakoa and I am an in-person student at the Corvallis campus. My favorite hobbies are reading, spending time with friends, and being outdoors. I have one pet (she’s really more like my child), a Yorkshire terrier with an attitude problem. Her name is Kimchi. 

I was fortunate to grow up in a somewhat computer-literate family, but I didn’t consider studying them until college. I came into OSU undecided and found that I lacked a lot of passion for most areas of study. I decided that CS, specifically cybersecurity, was a field that I found interesting and worked around my other aspirations.