#wk02

Ciphertext: i ehvg cevvrkdy

I went on to research more about Claude Shannon, and long story short he was an important figure for his theory on the concept of entropy. He demonstrated how entropy was a degree of randomness in systems. As such, information content could he shorotened without it’s meaning being loss. the English language has many redundancies that could be removed and still make sense. Ths is a perfect exmple. This kind of application could be used in computer designs to significantly shorten the number of bits required to store information and contributed heavily to cryptology.

I enjoyed this week’s lectures. From learning about the enigma machine and how it can be broken through brute force to the vignere cipher and famous people like Claude Shannon. I went to further resaerch about the enigma machine and found out it had 3 rotors with letters around each rotor. A person would encrypt a message by typing with the enigma machine, where lights would light up on random letters and you would have to take note on that to be able to decrypt the message later. The rotor would rotate per letter and once it has gone through a fully cycle, the next rotor would rotate. This meant that if two letters typed were the same, the output would not be identical (using different alphabet substituion), which made it so much harder to decrypt. However, this system meant that the  output letter would never match the input letter, hence it made it easier to brute force the system in order to decrypt it.

I found the Houdini case study very interesting. The articles had painted Margery as an extroadinary medium who was able to convince many of her abilities. Houdini, however, was determined to expose her through various methods and tricks, such as placing rubber on the contact points of the bell so that it could not be rung by the spirit. However, all his tricks were uncovered by the spirit. Many years later, she was found to be fraudulent when her wax trick matched her doctor’s fingerprint. This case study has allowed me to see how easy it is to trick others, as well as the depth and scale required to keep the farce. Without solid facts, no one was willing to not believe in Margery and her ability, and she was able to trick everyone with the help of collusions and keeping things confidential. It would be hard to debunk her if one was to talk to loved ones through Margery, as information can be easily obtained through investigations, and all your information would be known by her,

Explain its use in different situations, its threats and how it can be prevented

I found this concept very interesting and very applicable in day to day life. This includes reading horoscopes and deciding whether or not you believe them, to being inspected for ID and determining if the person you are inspecting is really the person in the ID. The comes about many false positives and false negatives and we are mainly worried about evening out people who fall in type I or type II categories to maintain a functioning society. After more digging, I’ve learn that type I error are false positives. Believe that the hypothesis is wrong based on results while it is correct, and type II errors are false negatives, believe the hypothesis even though it is incorrect. An example of this can be made with deciding if Person A is innocent in the crime. Type I error would be that person A is being judged guilty even though they are really innocent. Type II error would be judging person A as innocent even through he really is guilty.

By simply using recon to determine a single person’s lifestyle and personal details as well as frequent whereabouts, I see how this concept can be used as a dangerous weapon to take advantage of individuals who are not security aware and leaving too many footprints about themselves

Result of the group deduction