Information Assurance
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Individual Projects
Because our study of information assurance is necessarily shallow,
given the number of topics we need to cover, this project is an
opportunity for you to learn some topic of your choice in depth.
This project will have two parts. The first will be topic selection
and project definition. You will propose a topic and describe the
work that you intend to perform for the project. I will review your
proposal to ensure that it is reasonable, and this will be used as
the basis for grading the project - you must significantly meet
what you propose. The proposal should include a topic; what you
expect to learn; a thesis or prediction of what you expect to
happen; a plan of work; and what tools, equipment, and permissions
you need to perform the project, as applicable. This should be two
pages and contain sufficient detail for me to understand what you
are trying to do and to convince me you have everything you need to
complete the project.
The second part will be a project report, in which you present the
results of your project. This should be long enough with enough
detail so that someone could easily repeat your work if they
desired. It should explain what you found and if your finding
matched your predictions or supported your thesis. This should be
8 to 10 pages long, depending on what project you come up with.
Possible Topics
While I have a few suggestions for topics, I highly encourage you
to think of topics of your own that may relate to other interests
or activities you might have. Even if you have an ill-defined idea
or interest, talk to me and maybe we can refine it into a project.
- Spam is a major problem today for many companies and
ISPs. The computational cost of forwarding many (sometimes in the
millions) advertising messages often overwhelms mail servers,
resulting in poor performance for non-commercial email. Plus it is
a pain to have to wade through it all. An interesting project
might be to determine how spammers find e-mail addresses. Open a
number of mail accounts, and put the addresses in different
places, and see how soon you get spam, and how much an account
gets depending on if the mail is replied to or not.
- If you work for or have access to some organization that is
computer related, get permission and perform a risk analysis for
that organization. You will have to do a little more research to
perform a more detailed analysis than we covered in class.
- Steganograpy is a method of concealing information within
some other data - currently, most steganographic software conceals
information within images. Since this technique is rumored (and
perhaps proven to some) to be used by terrorists and other
potentially evil folk, some recent research has looked at ways of
detecting steganographic images. As a project, you could download
and some software used to detect such images from http://www.outguess.org/detection.php,
and use it to check images you obtain on-line. This project can
require considerable processing power to check lots of
images.
- The widespread use of wireless networks presents a great
convenience for many people, but also poses a security risk when open
wireless networks are installed behind firewalls. Wardriving is the
practice of driving around trying to find open networks. One possible
project might be to wardrive (or walk) an area, and try to locate open
networks. You would then try and find out whose networks they are and
alert them to the possible dangers of having an open network. Next, go
back some time later and see how many people have taken steps to
protect their networks.
- I have had this desire to offer a short course to incoming
Georgetown students that I would call "Computer Self Defense". A
possible project would be to outline how you would construct a
course like this. in particular, I am interested in a design for a
one to two hour course for incoming freshmen. What do you think
they would need to know to be secure and maintain their privacy?
What topics would you address in a short time? What exercises could
you do to help the students learn effectively?
- If you are interested in computer forensics, you might try to
complete a current forensic challenge, such as the ones posted at:
http://www.honeynet.org/scans/
- I have some network software that is to be released publicly
after the semester. If you are interested in secure programming and
have some network programming experience, you might like to do a
security review of this software.
- Though we will do some secure programming exercise over the
semester, if you are interested in a larger programming project, I
have some ideas.
Please do try and come up with some of your own projects! I'd be
happy to talk to you about what you might like to do.
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