Capstone Reflection Paper

The first nine weeks of Network Security in Capstone significantly influenced my project idea and final project outlay. The entirety of the Java server-client network allowed the conceptual initiation that founded what I truly was interested in pursuing as my Capstone project. My initial project ideas were slightly sporadic and variations of two separate main ideas of hacking or networking. The less feasible option to develop my own hacking application lacked my personal motivation and experience. While the network security and development catered more toward my pre-existing experience with Windows Server 2008 R2 that accumulated at my internship. Along with the server experience, I dealt with OS security throughout the past four years

Through personally developing my own server-client network, I was able to better understand the concepts of networking. I was individually able to manipulate the program to better undertake the communication aspect, the level of security, and organization of information in code and to the end-user. From this mini project, I learned the communication process between systems and how to first initiate a connection. I also learned the fundamentals of server sockets, regular sockets, print streams, and buffered readers in addition to multithreading, try-catches, and exceptions. And lastly, the utmost important aspect, I gained a full understanding of the concept of networking once I personally learned, through development, the intricate network

And though the material we covered was very slim, I’m still thankful that the project we did was the project we did. I realize that my actual project is very much based on the mini project on a larger scale, but I believe that an extension of material we covered (accompanied by a more organized and structured lesson plan) would have incentivized a more detailed project scope at the equivalent confidence level currently being expressed by the students. While more material would have been beneficial to both parties, the initial mini server-client project was essential to the baseline understanding of my project, and hopefully everyone else’s project too. If we did not, as a class, take on the server-client project, I do not believe I would have the same confidence or motivation I have now. That being said, I’m sure the rest of my classmates would have sufficiently benefitted from a wider variety of topics that could have been accessed if the proposed CTF idea by Jake and Roman actually occurred. Then again, I believe a few interesting aspects were offered through the annual MetaCTF competition but occurred too late in the project timeline. The only other aspect to critique of this first nine weeks is represented in the mini project.