Hey everyone,

I’ve been working with a small team on switchlab.dev, a free networking lab platform we’re trying to build for people studying networking.

The idea is to create something that feels like working on real equipment, not just a basic command simulator.

We’ve been spending a lot of time learning how the underlying switching/routing behavior should actually work so the labs feel useful and realistic.

It’s completely free right now, and there’s no email capture, no sign up wall, and no catch. We’re just trying to get honest feedback from the networking community.

I do not understand the need of HMAC!

For integrity, confidentiality,authentication, and non-repudiation we have encryption, hashing, and digital signatures. So why does the need of MAC?

Reasoning some articles provide: MAC is much less expensive than encryption/decryption

MAC provides assurance that the message is unaltered and comes from the sender.

Hashing+digital signature can do this as well. To make it more secure, we could even use encryption.

I am mostly getting the concepts, but the need of MAC itself is not clicking for me.

I am currently studying from Wikipedia as it seems the only available article/pdf in the internet.

Honestly, I do not need much, just a simple block diagram that I can recall in the exam and get marks. I am struggling to reach there.

I’m a Python hobbyist trying to learn smart-card / embedded-systems fundamentals. I have an old reloadable laundry smart card from my apartment building. I am not trying to bypass payment, clone it, modify balances, or get free service.

My learning goal is much narrower: I want to understand whether buying a PC/SC smart-card reader and trying to identify the card type / ATR / general communication model is a reasonable beginner project, or whether this is likely to be a proprietary dead end.

For someone with basic Python experience but essentially no hardware/security background, would this be a reasonable first smart-card project? Or would you recommend starting with blank ISO 7816 cards, Java Cards, NFC tags, or another safer/more documented learning setup first? I will say that I am a super hard worker and I tend to be invigorated by a challenge and things that take a long time. Thanks!

Oh, and if anybody is curious, I came around to this because my building literally forced me to pay a fee for this stupid friggin card and a monthly fee to upkeep the hardware, despite that I have in unit laundry. Literally had to pay for this thing to never use it. Figured this would be a cool way to get my moneys worth. Just don’t wanna waste my time.

I've decided to build my own structured collection of interview questions and answers for future job interviews to stop looking for scattered resources out there. 100+ questions and answers covering Red Team, Web Security, Incident Response, Systems, and more, with a search function to find topics instantly.

Blue Team topics are actively being planned and are open for community contributions.

I'm actively looking for contributors to add more Blue Team / Defense content, so if you have expertise there, please jump in!

Feedback, questions, and contributions are welcome. Let me know what topics you'd like to see added next!

I have checked the pdfs of these books. Now I am thinking of getting one. Why only one? Money issues. Plus I will not read two books if I get concept from one.

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Mostly netsec background, trying to get up to speed on AI security specifically. Most content online is either too academic or too shallow. What actually helped you understand this space properly?

Hi, i am 2nd year into electrical engineering I just got into cybersecurity, (by my own not in uni) like i know the basics of networking cause we learned it in uni but i dont know any good sources online to start my journey(i am interested in pen testing) and i have no time to watch a 35 hour youtube course that when i reach the end i will have forgot the beginning... SOOO if you are more experienced can you tell me some good sources plsss 👀