Cassandra – Command Line Operations

1. Install Cassandra 2. Start Cassandra Using Brew: Without Brew: 3. Check if it's up and running Using Brew: Without Brew: 4. Stop Cassandra Using Brew: Without Brew: 5. Start Cassandra Query Language Command Line Tool 5. Create KeySpace A keyspace is the top-level database object that controls the replication for the object it contains …

Paper Review: Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge

This paper was published by DeepMind to describe how its AI-powered Go program AlphaGo Zero has evolved from its predecessor AlphaGo Lee which was explained in "Mastering the Game of Go With Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search" published in 2016. AlphaGo was already able to beat several human players in the past. For example, …

Design Principle #1: Consider static factory method pattern instead of constructors

In some scenarios, instead of having a constructor, it is better to have a public static factory method that returns an instance of that class. For example, the below method returns an instance of the Boolean object when given boolean primitive type. public static Boolean valueOf(boolean val) { return b?Boolean.TRUE:Boolean.FALSE; } This method has the …

Paper Review: Mining Your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices

There have been a lot of security-related incidents due to poor random number generation. Keeping that in mind, the authors collected the keys to look for specific vulnerabilities and find the root cause for them. They have used two most used cryptographic protocol for analysis i.e. TLS and SSH. The authors used NMap to collect …

Paper Review: The Tangled Web of Password Reuse

This is an extremely interesting paper which investigates how an attacker can use their knowledge of knowing password on one site to guess the password on another site for the same user. Text-based passwords are commonly used across the web. Instead of creating and remembering different passwords across different sites, most of the users reuse …

Paper Review: Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0

In this paper, the authors argue that even though the user errors contribute to most computer security failures, yet user interfaces for security are almost non-existent. They perform a case study on PGP 5.0, a program that provides security and authentication for data communication. As per their findings, PGP 5.0, even though it has an …

Paper Review: Alice in Warningland: A Large-Scale Field Study of Browser Security Warning Effectiveness

This paper analyses to what extent, the browser security warnings are effective in practice.  The authors use Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers to observe over 25 million warning messages in May and June 2013. They have presented the rate at which the users bypass three types of warnings: malware, phishing, and SSL. It is …