It’s been a while since I wrote an article, so I want to talk about life and why I decided to write this. If you want to skip it, just proceed to the first header. I was quite busy these days, but not because I was a productivity monster working on a business idea that […]
We’ve covered IP in depth; how packets are structured, addressed, and handed off between layers. We went through TCP’s reliability and UDP’s lean, no-guarantee model. But there’s a gap we left open. We kept saying “packets hop through routers” without ever explaining how a router actually decides where to send something. The internet spans billions […]
It’s been a while since the last article, so it’s time to write another one. This is a standalone piece, separate from our original series. This article covers what cloud computing actually is, how it works, and what makes it different, written for people with no technical background. The article also includes some personal opinions […]
NDP comes up a lot alongside ARP because it essentially replaces ARP for IPv6 networks. Where ARP handles address resolution in IPv4, NDP takes on that role, and more in IPv6. One thing worth clarifying: NDP operates at Layer 3, not Layer 2 or the sometimes-cited “Layer 2.5” like ARP. This is because NDP is […]
If you’ve read the previous article on ARP, you already know how the protocol works, devices broadcast a “who has this IP?” and whoever owns it replies with their MAC address, no authentication involved. That last part is the reason this article exists. No authentication gives us an attack surface. ARP was designed in a […]
We’ve already covered TCP and UDP for data transfer, and how the IP layer wraps them for transport. Now we’re going one layer lower, the link layer, where we need to talk about how IP addresses get mapped to MAC addresses. You can find all the scripts used in this article, as well as the […]
Encoding characters was a first step toward building software with text, and with text, we can already make a console game. But why stop there? Games deserve images too, and to render those images, we need to understand how they’re encoded. You might wonder why a security blog talks about games to explain a low-level […]
You might be wondering why the title is so long. The reason is simple: character encoding is a fundamental aspect of every digital system. It’s nearly impossible to explain it fully without first covering the basics. That’s why I’ve included everything the article will cover right in the title. This article walks you through everything […]
UDP: connectionless, fast, and built for speed over accuracy, the go-to protocol for real-time gaming, streaming, and anything where being fast matters more than being perfect. You might think UDP can’t be explained in a single line. Nevertheless, while this article sets out to explain UDP, as we go through it, we’ll find that we’re […]
Once the TCP handshake completes, data begins to flow between machines. This article breaks down how that data moves across the network using the TCP protocol. Packet flow is handled by two protocols: TCP and UDP. This article covers TCP; UDP will be covered next. Prerequisites: Familiarity with the TCP/IP transport layer and basic socket […]