It's been a week on my internship. On the first day, I did mostly paperwork and prep stuff. One of the things that was acute to me was the fact that everyone spoke Chinese to me. Remarkably, I was able to somewhat communicate with everyone all in Chinese (a pat on the back... yay... my Chinese surprisingly is not too crap).
Since then I think I am able to continue increase my confidence in being able to communicate. I think there are times when I can use English (actually my coworkers encourage me that I can speak English, but even during those times, it was pretty difficult because most others communicate to me and each other in Chinese. It would seem incredibly awkward to be the only one who is speaking in English.
On the second day, I've attended one of their weekly meetings to present on what they have done. This made me realize how much the supervisor was expecting, and that he had a very clear vision of how one should present, and how stuff should be done. Again here, Chinese was chiefly used. Here I was assigned to do something related to AFL fuzzing (which I have not heard much about).
So the next few days, I went ahead to experiment a bit with the fuzzing tool; to test this, I wrote a few programs that had a classic buffer overflow and one with a heap exploit. I found out that the AFL fuzzer in fact took very little time to realize that there was a bug. Something that makes this AFL fuzzer (a gray-box tool) different from others was the fact that it used genetic algorithms to try to find all the possible paths, (and possible edge cases) by using random mutations (bit flips, dictionary attack, byte flips, splicing, and other such mutations). It takes some valid input test cases as input, and then mutate it, pruning out those test cases that do not cause a different path, and then use the interesting mutations as seed for further test cases.
So on the third day, I found a fellow intern (who could not speak Chinese, so I spoke in English :relief:) who is also working on AFL fuzzing; (she only came on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons because she has classes other times). This was good for me because I will then be able to discuss some of our findings with each other, so to figure out whether if we are going on the right track or not. What strike me as intriguing was the fact that she was already a Ph.D student; (meanwhile I am a mere 1st/2nd year). Hehehe, I realized basically everyone here in this department are of a older age than me (though not that much older, maybe only 10-15 years older).
On the fourth and fifth day, I basically continued doing the same thing as I did, working with this fuzzer, trying to figure out what it does. Though, I am not entirely sure if I like it or not because on one hand, it is similar to like binary exploitation and reversing, but on the other hand, it's also very heavily weighted in some less interesting (boring) stuff like the mathematical models and all that nitty gritty stuff. Oh well, we'll see how this goes as I progress with it. I also don't know what I would present on this (I have two weeks probably to figure out something to present).
On a side note, I was able to connect with some of my other colleagues just by showing my current side projects (my c compiler and my CTF problem, profile2, which to this date, no one has solved it yet, even when one person decided to try out angr with it, tehehehe!).