The Silly Point

A.       Typecasting issue in C++ C++ code of type casting, which is considered as an insecured code. The same problem occurred in Ariane 5, which ended up in a crash.  According to (Soulie, 2007) , Type casting is known as converting an expression of a given type into another type. In C, type converstion can be done using,    1.       Implicit Convertion –   one type of data is automatically converted into compatible type of data.    2.       Explicit Convertion – Many conversions, specially thos that imply a different interpreation of the value. It has 4 specific casting operators (dynamic_cast, reinterpret_cast, static_cast and const_cast). Here, the conversion truncates, that is the fractional part is discared. There is a data loss, since the out put is 13, expected output was 14. Remedy – Use static_cast and add 0.5 before casting. c = static_ca...

Ariane 5 was an unmanned rocket launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) after taking 10 years to develop it with a cost of $7 billion.   About 40 seconds after lifting off, the rocket exploded during its first voyage on 4 th of June, 1996 and ended in a failure and became one of the disastrous failures though there were no victims. An inquiry board which nominated by the Director General of ESA and the Chairman of CNES investigated the causes of crashing and issued a report. According to the report, reason behind this crash was a software failure. The root cause behind Ariane 5 flight 501’s crash was uncaught exception which could not handle during data conversion of 64-bit floating point number to 16-bit integer for the horizontal component of the velocity vector with respect to the platform and an overflow occurred. The crash occurred due to an oversight to handle this particular exception even though they handled...

Introduction Wireless networking is becoming the choice for business and home users alike since wireless network is easier and cheaper to configure software and hardware. Therefore, information security is a growing concern as wireless computer networks are on the increase and also due to intruders trying to intercept confidential information.   According to Siep et al. (2000) , the standards for wireless computer networks was initiated in 1997. As Stringer (2005) stated, wireless networks can be divided into two architectural modes, namely infrastructure and Ad hoc. In Infrastructure wireless station such as laptops, printers, etc. which communicates with each other and other network resources through an access point, whereas Ad hoc, wireless stations directly communicate with each other. Wireless Ad hoc networks pose many nontrivial challenges to security design than wired networks. This report illustrates how to prevent, detect and the action to be taken when wirele...