Shivam Dixit

Aug 29
Cracking Google Summer Of Code
Google Summer of Code is a program sponsored by Google to introduce students to open source programming. Students work on the projects mentored by different open source organizations. It is an incredible opportunity to learn the various tools and practices used in real world softwares. I was GSOC 2014 student under Open Web Application Security Project in my sophomore year. In this post I will shed some lights on how to start preparing for GSOC.
Aug 27
Storing Delicious Passwords
Most of the web applications require their users to authenticate themselves by asking them username and password. They compare the user supplied credentials with the data stored in their database and if the credentials match, the user is granted access. Sounds good! But what will happen if the database in which the website is storing your passwords gets compromised? This article covers various techniques of storing passwords in the database.
May 11
GSOC '14 WebGoatPHP Proposal
Abstract WebGoat is one of the most popular open source web applications developed by OWASP. It is a deliberately insecure web application developed using Java to provide a security awareness environment. It offers a set of challenges based on various vulnerabilities listed in OWASP. Since PHP is extremely popular in web applications and has many of the security flaws which Java doesn’t, my work is to develop a deliberately insecure PHP web application.
Feb 7
What Happens When You Power On Your Computer
Ever wondered what all goes inside your computer when you switch on the power button? How is an Operating System loaded ? How you are presented with an user friendly GUI screen? Through this post I will peek into the booting process of UNIX like Operating Systems and try to answer some of the questions. Some of the things discussed in this post are also valid for Windows operating system.
Jan 29
Custom 404 page in Apache
What is 404 error? When you fire up your web-browser and type in, say google.com/foo, your web-browser makes a request to the server for page “foo”. In return, server returns a response with a special status code indicating the status of the request. If the page foo is not found on the server, 404 status code is sent in the respone. Some other common status codes are: 200 : OK 301 : Moved Permanently 400 : Bad Request 401 : Unauthorized 403 : Forbidden 404 : Not Found 500 : Internal Server Error What is .