Top Secret!

The theme for this month’s Assemble learning party was Top Secret!

We wanted to create a few short activities to introduce kids to some concepts in security.

*What it means to brute force a password. Try it out yourself here. Their algorithms for what character(s) to try improved dramatically once they realized typing in a random characters was taking too long.

*CV Dazzle aka hiding from computer vision. Here we presented the kids with a tablet with OpenCV installed that would draw a box around a face when it detected one. The participants were given pieces of black and white flexible plastic to put on their faces to see if the computer would recognize their faces. We also had Phuong Vu’s CV-Dazzled code running to generate CV dazzle camouflage in order to give the kids a sense of what needed to be covered for them to be hidden.

*Public Key Encryption activity with 2 sets of keys and locks and a case.

*Diceware or using dice as a hardware random number generator to generate a secure password. Participants rolled 5 sets of dice 7 times to produce a 7 word passphrase.