Mentorships, Assembly, and Hashing

I have a mentor now. After getting to know each other in the interview last week, I asked him if he would be willing to mentor me, and he said yes. I made sure to let him know what exactly I want his help with - namely with coming up with an idea for my original work and actually creating it. Even though we have yet to hold our first, formal mentor visit, I feel as though he's already helped me much more than I had anticipated. He's pointed me to various upcoming hacking challenges and conventions that I'm very interested in attending, as well as some sources which might serve as inspiration for my original work. I'm going to refrain from having our first mentor visit for now, however, since I want to focus on preparing for my upcoming subject tests. Hopefully, by the next time I meet with him, I will already have an idea for my project.

In other news, an acquaintance of mine recently introduced me to the Assembly "language", which is essentially human-readable machine code. This is relevant to my research because using such a low-level language, I can actually pick apart even the most abstract malware and figure out how it works. It's a little confusing, but I feel like there's some real potential for a promising final product here.

Finally, I learned a little bit about hashing, why it's used, and how its implemented in databases that store sensitive information such as passwords. While cryptography is not particularly my strong suit, it's definitely something I want to research more in the future. After all, after the advent of commercial quantum computing, current cryptographic encryption/hashing methods may become obsolete.