On my first day at OSU, my roommate, who I had never met before, invited me to go to an ACM-W ice cream social in the number garden. All of the student leaders and other members were very welcoming quick to start conversations. Everybody there was excited to meet and get to know new members of the club and the Ohio State community. They asked about what I was interested in and immediately gave me advice on how to pursue those interests further. Upperclassmen in the club made it clear from the start that they were a resource to turn to for help and advice. I think this mindset of growth was so evident because of both the purpose of the club and the student leaders. The club has a foundation of inclusivity and welcoming. I joined the GroupMe for the club so I could stay up to date on meeting times and locations as well as to keep an ear open for other related opportunities. When they announced the second meeting, I got together with a couple other people on my floor to bring to the event. All of the student leaders in the club formally introduced themselves to the group then split us up into groups for ice-breakers. Everyone else there seemed just as excited and on board as I was; it was a fun environment. The next club event was a presentation by Northrop Grumman about how their company is involved in reverse engineering and how that relates to the field of computer science. The presentation was super interesting and very informative. He showed off Ghidra, an open source application created by the NSA for reverse engineering. First, he went over a basic example of using Ghidra to find an exploitable flaw in some demo code. The program asked for a 64 bit string input to register a new account but tried to store that information in a 32 bit variable. He explained that the remaining 32 bits of input could be used to insert a malicious shell program into the source code of the program that could have access to all kinds of secure information associated with account registering. After this, he stepped it up a lot with the second demo to a much more realistic example. The source code created by ghidra was stripped, meaning all of the values were non-descriptive and very hard to read. He showed how the application allowed the code to be split up into more readable sections and how this process allowed you to quickly build a better understanding of the program as a whole. Finally, he talked about something that I found super interesting: reverse engineering competitions. The second demo was actually an example problem from the largest of these competitions. Even though I only understood the problem at a very basic level, it’s definitely something that I’m interested in learning more about. ACM-W seems very passionate about creating opportunities to get involved and engaged with learning in the field of computer science. I can’t wait to continue my involvement with them.
