--Originally published at IT Security – Debugging My Mind

Confidentiality as I’ve mentioned before, is a key property that any application must have, you don’t want your personal data that any app you download so easily asks for to be out there for anyone to see, otherwise we would just be carrying around papers with all our info taped to our backs.

This is why as developpers we have to always assume any info we ask out of someone about them can be personal, we don’t know whether someone thinks their name can be public, or someone who thinks it should be kept private unless absolutely needed otherwise, so it’s better to keep things as confidential as possible by default, rather than publicly out and easy to obtain.

One of the main methods to keep confidentiality of data we have stored of our users is by the use of encryption. Using a hashing algorithm we change that plain text info into an unreadable mess that requires computation to solve, adding salt and pepper we make it very difficult to go back to the original text without  the key, making it so that data cannot be precomputed in bulk as a rainbow attack.

Handling data of young children makes it even more sensitive, as their personal information is being handled by other people that have to be responsible for it. This wasn’t an issue back when we were younger, but these kids live in the digital age, where the internet is predominant and their info can easily be thrown out there for anyone to see without their consent or them even knowing. It wouldn’t be nice us as adults right now to find out that back when we were young and couldn’t do anything about it our information was put out there easy for people to find and read.

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--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

Integrity. The property of data not being altered or destroyed by an unauthorized entity; such a property isn’t so easily assured to a client, and that’s why we needed a plan as to how we were gonna do it.

Our application consists of 2 separate main modules, the school management part of the app, consisting purely on the web implementation, keeping track and being able to register teachers, students and checking on their information, while on the other side we have the game itself, responsible of handling all the logic to provide the levels, with their defined difficulty, as well as keeping track itself of temporal progress data from each student.

Our main concern related to data integrity surged from the communication between these modules, more specifically, between the game and the database, since there has to be a stable connection to be storing each separate level, as well as obtainning the new predicted difficulty for the game, there is a chance of data being corrupted or lost in the process should a connection error occur.

Because of the glaring problem that the lack of connection of the game with the server creates, we decided to design the game itself in such a way that it can work independently whether there is a connection to the database or not. To do this, the game will do several checks before starting: first, it will try to connect to the server to obtain the user’s required information, such as their profile, predicted new difficulty and money for the store, should this connection fail there will be 2 options. One of them is executed if there are no locally stored information, where the game will begin in a “default” mode, where the player plays through the game as if they started back from