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CST 311 - Week 7

In this penultimate week of class, I learned about how the link layer functions and its governing protocols, how networks discover MAC addresses and map them to respective IP addresses, and finally the topic of cryptography as it relates to communications over networks. 

The link layer's main protocol is ARP, or the Address Resolution Protocol. Its main function is to resolve IP addresses associated with specific MAC addresses on networks, and relies on switches, routers, or a lack of either, to achieve this goal. Similar to other request-response protocols, if a source system decides to send a message to a destination it must know the appropriate information, or if not discover and save such information for future reference. This is also one of the main purposes of ARP: it caches MAC addresses attached to IP addresses in lookup tables, which are discovered through broadcast and reply messages. 

Cryptographic hash functions are a topic that I have always wanted to study for personal knowledge, and I am glad I got an introduction to them this week. I still find the math behind cryptography complex and the white papers behind functions such as SHA-2 even more so, but I believe it's important as a developer to understand how these functions work in order to build more secure solutions. I have to generate SHA-512 checksum values frequently at work using a fancy GUI tool for Windows' built in "certutil" function, and now that I understand the principles of message digests and public/private key encryption I find my tasks are more meaningful.

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