I completed my honours degree in 2004 at Napier University in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK). These are some of the modules I studied there: Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, Evolutionary Computing, Real-Time Software Engineering, Software Architecture, Software Project Management, Computer Games Software Engineering and others.

Click here to see some pictures from the graduation ceremony.

Special thanks to Dr Les Morss, Mr Tim Musson, Mr Greg McCarra, Dr Emma Hart, Dr Bob Bain, Dr Jose Munoz, Dr Hazel Hall, Mr Bruce Cowan, Mr Alistair Lawson, Professor Ben Paechter, Ms Sally Smith, Dr Shaun Lawson and Professor Peter Ross. Very special thanks to Professor William Buchanan, leader of the Distrbituded Systems and Mobile Agents research group, who taught me all the fundamentals of research and kept me always enthusiastic and motivated.

The honours project achieved 1ST CLASS, and it was about:

"COVERT CHANNELS ANALYSIS AND DATA HIDING IN TCP/IP
WITH REVERSE PROXY SERVERS IN MICROSOFT WINDOWS"

A paper based on this honours project was presented at the ECIW 2004, the 3rd European Conference on Information Warfare and Security. The event was held at the Royal Holloway, University of London (England, UK) on 28-29 June 2004. More details here.

Do you want to see the Reverse Proxy Server (RPS) and the Data Hiding Intelligent Agent (DHIA) in action?. Download the Sniffer and the Data Hiding Viewer. Unpack, run and configure them. See the covert message appearing while you are navigating through here.

This is a real example about covert channels generation through the fragment identification ID (IPv4ID) field of the IP version 4 header, and it has been designed and implemented for Microsoft Windows platforms, where the TCP/IP protocol driver source code is not available ... ;-) ... so, doubly difficult!. Download the thesis for further information.

The honours project won the second prize at the Scotland Young Software Engineer of the Year 2004, sponsored by Vision Consulting and Scottish Enterprise and Organised by ScotlandIS.

• The letter from ScotlandIS that announced the prize
• An article from Ideas Factory Scotland
• Two articles from Napier University
• Napier University Annual Review 2004, see page 10 and 11

The event was hold at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) on Friday 10th Sep 2004. Some pictures here.