Fighting cyber-crime one app at a time

This summer Victoria University of Wellington will be home to four Singaporean students researching cyber threats.

The students have been working with Dr Ian Welch, a lecturer in Victoria’s school of Engineering and Computer Science, as part of a partnership between Victoria and Singapore Polytechnic.

In their final year of the diploma in information security, the students have been working in groups to develop software to protect online programmes from malicious software or malware such as viruses or spyware.

One of the group projects is a malware detection site called Open Bouncer which is used to test Android apps to see if they are secure and reliable.

This open source platform offers two levels of information. The first shows clearly if the application is safe or not and for more tech savvy users there is the option to expand on the results to show more detail and even add to the software themselves.

Open Bouncer has gone further than the classroom, with the group receiving the opportunity to show off their website at a high profile event in Singapore called GovermentWare, where they explained the software to a government minister.

Dr Welch has been remotely mentoring the students over the past few months through weekly Skype calls. He says he is looking forward to finally meeting them in person.

“They have been working on practical software projects, and this visit will help them get research backing for the work they are doing.”

As well as providing advice, Dr Welch helped the students to test their programmes to see if they would stack up against real cyber threats. Dr Welch says when it came to testing how effective their software was at fighting cyber criminals they used similar methods to the ones police use to catch regular criminals.

“The police will set up a ‘honey pot’ where a car is left unlocked in a rough end of town waiting for thieves to steal it. We did something similar by leaving a piece of software unprotected and waited for the malware to attack. When it did the students were able to test their programmes against a real threat.”

The testing paid off and Open Bouncer will soon be available for public use. A video demostration of the Open Bouncer system is now available at: https://openbouncer.catoace.com/drIan/Video/Trailer.mp4

For more information, contact Dr Ian Welch, phone 04 463 5664 or email Ian.Welch@ecs.vuw.ac.nz