Kieran Hogan – C12561353 - Security 1 – Dt228-4 – Assignment 2
Part A
The Heartbleed bug is a security flaw in the Open SSL cryptography library which was exposed in April 2014. This flaw effected systems all around the world using SSL/TLS encryption at the time. The bug allowed anyone to read the memory of systems protected by these now outdated versions of OpenSSL.
The Heartbleed bug is directly related to cryptography as it effected one of the largest encryption libraries in the world. OpenSSL is used to protect emails, instant messengers, and even secure VPNs. The bug compromised the secret keys of systems, and allowed attackers to eavesdrop on communications and steal data mid communication. The vulnerabilities of this bug can be eliminated
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It is possible to fry a GFX card by working it too hard and overheating, so care must be taken. When spending bitcoins, private keys are used to authenticate partys in the transaction.
Other Cryptocurrencies include Litecoin and Dogecoin. These were started after Bitcoin and are still less popular, but do still have users. The blockchain for Litecoin can handle more transactions, but other than this it is quite similar to Bitcoin. Dogecoin is another peer to peer currency similar to Bitcoin that works off the same type of public block chain system. However they implement the scrypt hash algorithm. Designing hardware to compute this algorithm is much harder.
Mining bitcoins using a laptop or smart phone is quite inefficient and difficult. The GPU in a laptop or smartphone (if one is present) cannot handle the heat for the prolonged period of time necessary to mine a significant amount of bitcoin. Doing so would likely damage the device. If one is serious about mining, they are better off investing in dedicated mining hardware like an AntMiner. This offloads the computing to external hardware, which is dedicated to
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This involves downloading and synchronizing with the Bitcoin network, which involves going back as far as 6 years ago. This method validates every block and transaction, is considered to be a far more secure way of managing a Bitcoin wallet as it helps keep it decentralized. However, due to the huge size and data cost of the download of synchronizing with the network, I abandoned this process.
I proceeded to mining bitcoin. I downloaded BitMinter, a bitcoin mining pool application that allows you to join a pool and mine using GPU, CPU or mining hardware. I decided to use my GPU since I did not have access to bitcoin mining hardware. Having run the mining software for 14 hours, I had 6464 proofs of work accepted by the server. Logging into the BitMinter login, I could see that I was credited payment of 0.00000186 BTC for block 385966. My GPU reached 69°C max due to fan usage.
From my calculations, I found that dividing that payment by 14 hours of work done, multiplying by 24 for a day, and then multiplying by 365 for a year .00116382857 of a Bitcoin earned per year. This indicates that it would be around 860 years of mining before a full bitcoin is earned. This shows how mining with a GPU is not only potentially dangerous, but also incredibly