Adwiteeya Agrawal Security fanatic. Reverse Engineer and Web App Specialist.

I had been playing around too much with the VoIP PBX(asterisk) that I had setup and hence I decided it to be the 3rd year project. I had really worked hard for this one. Firstly it was a totally different technology all together, plus whatever work you do is more of kinda research rather than knowing before hand weather it was going to work or not.

Now we hadour viva for the project on 29th of September 2012. And obviously 28th was going to be the day for its final completion. The binding and printing was destined to be done on 29th itself. That’s the general trend we go by, here in colleges in Delhi, India.

So late till 4:30 i had completed my projected. I was a little relaxed with the printing because I had a colored printer at home and it was working fine. So the very next morning at around 8:30 i started the printing of the project.
The first disappointment that I had was that there was not going to be any kinds of project presentation it was only and only a viva. But this was not that harmful as if i talk about only and only me…. my project required setting up hardware and yes that could have been cumbersome for an on the spot kind of a thing plus it was not enough to write a blog post…things like this happen a million times when you are in IP university. The disappointment came as follows:-

I had been making an excuse for not scoring really good in exams, for getting up late in the morning, for always being on my laptop to friends and family that I was doing “security”, and this right here was going to be my very first project about security. So I had nerved myself for this viva. This was the right moment where I would have been tested on grounds that I consider my grounds.

Not that I was prepared and all set to face the music, I was scared too, I was as afraid as I would have been if I were giving a viva related to java programming, but the only difference was that i am going to test myself here, and it was happening the way it was supposed to be, people were being questioned like hell each viva being conducted for a span of 20 minutes. And finally i was the next in line for viva, but then suddenly a different teacher entered the room who is supposedly a lenient teacher but a really knowledgeable one. She was going to take my viva. I was both happy and sad. I was happy that the viva was going to be a comfortable one, on the other hand i was sad, and here comes the disappointment, because it was over in 5 minutes. All I was asked was what a PBX is and what is your project about. Then randomly i was asked about what one of the attacks were. I wasnt asked what codes are used, should be used, what are the tradeoffs in the communication channel, i wasnt asked  protocol compositions, I wasnt asked really anything technical.
A lot of my friends who I told about this, said that if they were in my place they would have been more than just super happy and would have danced as they walked out of the room. Yes i would have done that too if it were not about security.

Anyways case close. Move on.