My first takeaway was a Apache web server. After watching the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glU-qJb1mD8 I learned that Apache is a web server application that helps deliver web content through the internet. Apache was first introduced in early 1995 and has been the main HTTP server since 1996. In 2009 it became the very first web server software to have served over 100 million websites. Apache is an open source software and is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation and is most commonly used on a Unix server. It can be used on servers with Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, OS X, and many others. As of June 2013, Apache was estimated to have served 52.4% of all websites and 53.3% of the top servers. Apache is written in the C language and the author of Apache is Robert McCool. Apache is used because it is freely available, robust, and has plenty of features.
My second takeaway was the ETX4 Kernal Module. I found an article at http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4 that explains just what EXT4 is. EXT4 is a file system used by Linux and other distribution of Linux operating systems. It supports a bigger file system over the EXT3, with 1 Exabyte (which is equivalent to 1,000,000 Terabytes) of maximum file system size and 16 Terabytes of maximum file size. EXT4 also supports an unlimited number of sub directories whereas EXT3 supports 32,000. EXT4 utilizes a multiblock allocator to allocate many blocks in a single call, being much more efficient and much more fast than EXT3 which could only allocate one block at a time. There are many more features and upgrades that EXT4 has over EXT3 but I don’t really understand what they mean or what they do.
My third takeaway was SSL. The second post on http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/20803/how-does-ssl-tls-work has a good explanation on how SSL works. SSL is a protocol that operates with TCP to make protocols on higher layers secure without changing too much. If SSL is used correctly , the only thing that an attacker can see is the IP and port you are connected to, how much data you are sending, and what encryption and compression is being used. The SSL is started by the client, which sends specifications to the server. The server then checks what SSL version is supported by both the client and server and then picks a ciphersuite, which is a set of cryptographic algorithms used to protect information, and selects a compression method. Next, the server sends its certificate and this certificate must be trusted by the client or a party that the client trusts. After the certificate is verified, a key is exchanged and both the server and client can compute a key for the symmetric encryption. The client tells the server that all communication will be encrypted and sends an encrypted and authenticated message to the server. The server then verifies that the MAC address is correct and that the message can be correctly decrypted, and then returns a message which is verified by the client.
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