Network Engineering Student wins best paper award

PhD Student Masood Mansoori has been awarded best student paper at the Australasian Information Security Conference (AISC) on how to scan networks in order to allow the automation of this creation of a network of "honeypots". He wrote this paper in conjunction with Hamid Mohammadzadeh from the University of Malaya and Dr Ian Welch from Victoria University.

Honeypots are computers that only exist in order to attract the attention of hackers and observe their activities. Ideally an enterprise should create a network on honeypot computers to hackers. Doing this is manually is a hugely time consuming task and so automated approaches have been suggested ("dynamic honeypots"). What Masood and his colleagues did was to experimentally test which was the best approach was to automatically discover the details of the real computers so that the honeypots would appear the same.

Australasian Information Security Conference (AISC) is part of the 2013 Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) and attracts submissions from Australasia and wider afield. This year, ACSW was hosted by the University of South Australia in from January 29 to February 1st in Adelaide.