MSc/Masters

M.Sc. Thesis Prizes

The Information Security Group offers a number of prizes every year to M.Sc. candidates who produce outstanding M.Sc. theses. These prizes are a reward for the hard work that these candidates have put into their projects. There are two different types of prizes currently offered by the group:

 

The David Lindsay Prize

The David Linsay Prize is awarded every year by the British Computer Society Computer Security Specialist Group to the project that best addresses innovative applications of Information Security. It is open to all M.Sc. and B.Sc. projects which focus on information security and the decision is made by British Computer Society Computer Security Specialist Group.

Recent winners of the David Lindsay prize include:

  • 2009: Investigating the Use of Static Analysis Techniques to Detect Obfuscation in Web-Based Content Attacks by Tony Broad
  • 2008: Securing Mobile Voice End to End: Design Challenges in Developing Commercially Acceptable Solutions by John Wigley
  • 2007: The Impact of Virtualisation Upon Forensics Procedures by Matthew Hanrahan
  • 2006: An Investigation into the Information Security Threats faced by a Small Network by David Thomas Hawks
  • 2005: (Artificially) Immune Based (Hybrid) Intrusion and Detection and Prevention Systems by Georgiadis Filippos
  • 2004: An Open Framework for Simplifying the Use and Development of Source Code Analysis Tools by Nessim Kisserli

 

Search Security Awards

A number of M.Sc. projects are chosen to receive Search Security awards. These awards are given to those projects which best present research in an area of information security of interest to information security managers and professionals. These projects are re-written as short articles for a general audience and published online at SearchSecurity.co.uk. The full projects are published as a Mathematics Department technical reports.

Recent winners of the Search Security awards include:

  • 2009
    • Performance Analysis of Authentication Protocols in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) by Abdul Kalam Kunnel Aboobaker
    • The Domain Name System (DNS): Security challenges and improvements by Richard John Matthew Agar
    • Securing the Sage Notebook by Yoav Aner
    • Security Awareness for Children by Clara Brady
    • Leveraging The Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Countering Organised Crime by Anna Cevidalli
    • Business to Business Data Sharing using Trusted Computing by Stephen S. Khan
    • Improving Residual Risk Management through the Use of Security Metrics by Jonathan Pagett
    • Attestation in Trusted Computing: Challenges and Potential Solutions by Andrew Lee-Thorp
  • 2008
    • Interdomain Routing Security (BGP4) by Rostom Zouaghi
    • Maximing the Effectiveness of Information Security Awareness by Geordie Stewart
    • Information Security Awareness: An Innovation Approach by Carlos Orozco Corona
    • Fuzzing for Software Vulnerability Discovery by Toby Clarke
    • Applying Misuse Case to Improve the Security of Information Systems by John Ruck
    • Buffer Overflows in Microsoft Windows Environment by Parvez Anwar
    • Management of Risks Associated with De-Perimetrisation by Kwok Keeng Lee
    • Digital Rights Management: Towards a Balance between Copyright Rights and Fair Use Exceptions by Christian Bonnici
    • Extending Secure Execution Environments Beyond the TPM by Talha Tariq
  • 2007
    • Intrusion Detection and Prevention: Immunologically Inspired Approaches by Devid Pipa
    • Metamorphic Virus: Analysis and Detection by Evgenios Konstantinou
    • Copy Protection of Computer Games by Richard Hyams
    • Forensics of BitTorrent by Jamie Acorn
    • Securing Financially Sensitive Environments with OpenBSD by Nicholas Humphrey
    • Cheating and Virtual Crime in Massively Mulitplayer Online Games by Rahul Joshi
    • Review and Analysis of Current and Future European e-ID Schemes by Siddhartha Arora
    • Information Security Training & Awareness by Monique Hogervorst
    • Computer Security: A Machine Learning Approach by Sandeep Sabnani
    • Proposed Model for Outsourcing PKI by Christoper McLaughlin
    • Network Covert Channels: Review of Current State and Analysis of Viability of the use of X509 Certificates for Covert Communications by Carlos Scott
    • Detecting Pandemic and Epidemic Incidents through Network Telescopes: Security Analysis by Fotis Gagadis
    • Tigger Team -- A Novel Methodology to Manage Business Risk by Ian McKinnon