Projects

This a list of selected projects I have worked on. For others, refer to my publications and talks.

Anonymity and traffic analysis

A collection of software and datasets, on topics related to anonymity and traffic analysis.

Screentimelock

Screentimelock is a utility for GNU screen which allows the user to lock the terminal for a time period. This is to help avoid distractions, and reduce the temptation to be side-tracked by other activities.

Publication quality graphics

I am interested in improving the explanatory power and typographical quality of graphical representations of data in papers I write. To this end, I have written some functions for GNU R to produce data-rich graphs, based on ideas presented by Edward Tufte in his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

iButtons

In the course of a different research project, I have worked with Dallas iButtons. I dismantled two of them, and while these are sensors, not designed to have any significant security properties, the photos may still be of interest.

Chip and PIN

Along with colleagues from the Security Group, I have been investigating security aspects of the recent Chip and PIN deployment. Our initial comments are summarised in Chip and Spin. Since that document was published, we have been looking at issues in PIN distribution and, in particular, the tamper-evidence of laser-printed PIN mailers. Our Laser-printed PIN Mailer Vulnerability Report describes some problems we found. This document was distributed to users and manufacturers of tamper-evident mailers in November 2004 and since then they have been working to deploy improved products. As of August 2005 this report is now publicly available.

Our work on "snooping" the account number and PIN over the communication between card and terminal was featured in a program on ARD TV's Plusminus, by Sabina Wolf and on ITN news by Chris Choi. There is further information about this work on our interceptor page.

Project Dendros

I have been working on the representation of Compounds in Project Dendros and also the API through which the framework will be exposed to programmers.

Software detection of currency

Recent printers, scanners and image manipulation software identify images of currency, will not process the image and display an error message linking to www.rulesforuse.org. The detection algorithm is not disclosed, however it is possible to test sample images as to whether they are identified as currency. This webpage shows an initial analysis of the algorithm's properties, based on results from the automated generation and testing of images.

General-purpose data-representation formats and markup languages

In order to allow information to be easily exchanged a data format must exist, which facilitates sharing between different applications and different geographical locations throughout the evolution of both the data schema and software. There are a great number of existing solutions for this problem, each making different trade-offs and so resulting in radically different approaches. As a first step in exploring this area I have compiled a growing survey of general-purpose data-representation formats and markup languages.

Symbian OS programming

I have done some work on developing software for the Symbian OS, in particular on the Sony Ericsson P800. As part of that work I have written a brief "getting started" guide for developing Symbian OS applications on Windows using GCC.

Sun Ray 1

The Sun Ray 1 is a stateless thin client produced by Sun. I have briefly looked at the protocol used and produced some notes on the Sun Ray protocol.


Last modified 2009-07-31 17:32:24 +0100


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