BSc Projects 2007-2008

This academic year 2007/2008, I have supervised three BSc computer Science / BSc information systems final year project. The core project topic was on investigating performance of specific wireless security mechanisms. The project started in August 2007, with two students per project topic offered by the computer science department, and submission due by end April 2008. Hence, the students had enough time to embark on the project from understanding the project objectives, doing analysis and design of the system, implementation and testing. My project were mostly about analysis encryption algorithms used for wireless network security standard.

Project : Performance of Image Encryption using WiFi Protected Access, by Calleemalay Kavishen and Shakeel downlut. The project abstracts are as follows:

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a certification program created by the Wi-Fi Alliance which is now part of the IEEE 802.1x. WPA‟s original objective was to overcome the security limitations of the WEP which was once a standalone encryption protocol. WPA implements the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) encryption algorithm which improves WEP by adding two functions namely Key mixing and Michael to the WEP protocol which is composed of two other main functions known as RC4 and CRC-32. Key mixing generates a key for each packet to be encrypted while RC4 takes the key as input, computes a key stream and encrypts the data. Michael and CRC-32 are integrity checks which are used to verify the validity of the data after decryption. The objective of this project is to investigate the encryption of images using the TKIP algorithm and examine how the encryption process behaves when combined with a compression algorithm like JPEG. The motivation of this study is to determine whether compressing an image before the encryption process is more economical in terms of processing time than using the encryption alone. To do this a set of simulations were made with inputs as images of varying size and the output being the execution times of the main components of the TKIP and the JPEG compression algorithms. The results were compared and the combination of the compression and encryption processes was found to be faster by an amount dependent on the image size. A detailed analysis of the TKIP algorithm was also performed and the key mixing function was found to have a low complexity which fitted the restriction of having only few spare cycles available at the time of WEP deployment. The Michael was also found to be less expensive than the CRC-32 function which again fitted the restriction problem. TKIP can thus be deduced to be a good improvement of the WEP algorithm since the TKIP converted WEP into a secured protocol while not consuming a lot more resources.

Project : Wireless Security Software Code Re-engineering by Jay Domah and Sundeep Tengur

The Advanced Encryption Standard is one of the most secure security algorithms to date. It is used by
several organizations, including governmental agencies throughout the world to encrypt and secure data.
As we evolve in a digital world where communication is essential, the number of mobile computing
devices are ever-growing and along with it the need for wireless communication.
Wireless transmissions, by their very nature, are more exposed to attacks as they are not contained in a
restricted medium. Therefore, wireless data transmitted need to be encrypted to preserve their integrity
and ensure the privacy of the communication. Many existing wireless encryption tools such as WEP have
been cracked and their flaws exposed to the world. Since WEP had severe security weaknesses, the
802.11i specification was ratified in 2004 and it proposed the use of CCMP (Counter Mode with Cipher
Block Chaining Message Authentication Protocol) as an encryption protocol. CCMP is based on the
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
This project aims at optimizing the AES algorithm for wireless transmissions of mobile devices by
reducing the execution time while preserving the encryption strength of AES. The optimised algorithm
developed will preserve and make optimum use of mobile device resources such as CPU clock cycles,
memory and battery power. The objectives also include the investigation of AES in Cipher Block Chaining
(CBC) mode. Several simulations are conducted to analyse the speed, resource consumption and
encryption robustness of AES-CBC to investigate its viability for image encryption usage on common low
power devices.

Project: Security Software Implementation in Wireless Devices by Manesh Mooloo, Sumbhoolaul

As industry moves towards mobile computing, resources like battery life become significantly important for system usability. This project analyzes power consumption of a laptop while executing a security software to determine the most power efficient method. The study focuses on how the different encryption algorithms affect power consumption. Recommendations for transmitting data over wireless network are presented. This study can provide guidelines while writing security software applications for wireless devices that involve data transmission.

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