Scholarships - for Indian citizens only

A number of PhD Scholarships will be offered to students who have Indian citizenship to study at Queensland University of Technology Australia in the area of information security to commence sometime between July 2008 and February 2009.

These scholarships are being offered in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Society for Electronic Transactions and Security and Queensland University of Technology Australia

Conditions:

• Award of scholarships will be determined on the basis of academic merit.
• The award shall carry a living stipend of approximately AUD $26,000 per annum tax exempt and indexed annually as determined by QUT
• Tuition fee waivers may be available for international students.

Stipend:
A competitive stipend of $26,500 pa for living expenses (tax exempt and indexed annually) as well a waiver of tuition fees will be offered for 3 years.

Projects: The successful candidate will work in one of the following project areas:

• Probabilistic Packet Processing to Mitigate High-rate Flooding Attacks
• DoS defence appliance for Web services
• Cryptographic Puzzles for DoS mitigation in protocols for authenticated key exchange
• Denial of Service Vulnerabilities and Challenges in Emerging Technologies
• Harmonisation of Policy, Legal and Regulatory Environments for National Information Infrastructure Protection (NIIP).

Please click here [List of Projects] for full details of each of the above projects

For International Students

• FR Form and Guidelines
• Academic Referee Report

Can be downloaded at: http://www.rsc.qut.edu.au/future/apply/international.jsp

Closing Date: 25 July, 2008

More Information:
Please phone Dr Sheel Nuna, Tel: +91 124 414 4491 (International) (0124) 414 4491 (India) or email: sheel.nuna@qut.edu.au

LIST OF PROEJCTS

PROJECT 1
Title: Probabilistic packet processing to mitigate high-rate flooding attacks
Contact: Adjunct Professor George Mohay, Email: g.mohay@qut.edu.au

The objective of this research project is to extend existing denial of service mitigation schemes through the design, implementation and evaluation of probabilistic packet dropping schemes. It is envisaged that reputation schemes and machine learning techniques will be utilized in order to identify misbehaving nodes and in order to prioritise the traffic passing through the mitigation device. The research will involve applying the developed techniques to specific applications (for example, VoIP, wireless) in order tailor the techniques for those environments. Developed techniques will be evaluated in a laboratory environment using a variety of flooding-based as well as logical attacks.

PROJECT 2
Title: DoS defence appliance for web services
Contact: Dr Andrew Clark, Email: a.clark@qut.edu.au

This project will investigate challenges associated with denial of services attacks in the specific area of service oriented architectures and web services. The dynamic nature of these environments makes both assessing the threat level, and developing appropriate DoS mitigation schemes a significant research problem. Web services standards propose the use of various authentication schemes and these are likely to have a significant impact on the susceptibility of SOAs to denial of service attacks. This project will extend existing DoS defence architectures to include capabilities specific to the web services scenario. In particular the use of intelligent and adaptive packet discard strategies will be investigated. Also, the use of application-aware techniques will be explored. Developed techniques will be implemented and evaluated using a network laboratory.

PROJECT 3
Title: Cryptographic Puzzles for DoS mitigation in protocols for authenticated key exchange
Contact: Professor Colin Boyd, Email: c.boyd@qut.edu.au

Client puzzles are computational tasks used to show that a client entity is willing to commit computational resources in order to obtain a connection. They can be incorporated in key exchange protocols as part of a gradual authentication strategy to protect against denial of service. While client puzzles have been known about for some time, their practical use has so far been very limited. This project will investigate various methods of puzzle generation, combined with both a formal analysis of their usefulness and practical experimentation.

By constructing a formal model of what it means to protect against denial-of-service, much more meaningful analysis of concrete puzzles can be provided. This project will build on existing formal analysis of key exchange protocols by providing enhanced models incorporating denial-of-service properties. This will allow, for the first time, mathematical proof of resistance to denial-of-service. The project will also use simulations of puzzles as part of a gradual authentication strategy to measure performance under a variety of realistic attack scenarios. This will complement the theoretical studies and allow calibration of system parameters.

PROJECT 4
Title: Command and Control in Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Contact: Dr Jason Smith, Email: j.smith@isi.qut.edu.au

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks remain a persistent feature of, and significant threat to, the Internet. While a number of approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of responses to DDoS attacks, a more promising direction is the disruption of the command and control channels that attackers must utilise to direct attacks. Traditionally DDoS attackers have utilised centralised command and control channels (internet relay chat rooms for example), but in recognition that such centralised command and control approaches are a point of vulnerability, attackers have started to utilise more advanced methods of control. This project will investigate the evolution of command and control in DDoS attacks and develop techniques to aid in the disruption of DDoS when distributed next generation command and control channels are employed.

PROJECT 5
Title: Denial of service vulnerabilities in next generation architectures
Contact: Dr Jason Smith, Email: jc.smith@isi.qut.edu.au

Next generation application architectures are likely to be service-oriented and underpinned by IPv6 network infrastructure. Both of these technologies introduce new denial of service vulnerabilities. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) implemented using Web services (WS) can be considered more vulnerable to denial of service owing to the increased requirement for parsing extensible markup language (XML) requests and processing cryptographically expensive WS-Security extensions. IPv6 introduces new signaling protocols to support link auto-configuration and mobility, each of which can be used to mount new forms of denial of service attacks. In this research, denial of service vulnerabilities in these emerging technologies will be identified and strategies for remediated these vulnerabilities developed and evaluated experimentally.

PROJECT 6
Title: Harmonisation of Policy, Legal and Regulatory Environments for National Information Infrastructure Protection (NIIP).
Contact: Dr Adrian McCullagh, Email: a.mccullagh@qut.edu.au

The aim of this research project is to determine the current legal, regulatory and policy environments that exist in India and Australia in relation to the protection of national information infrastructures. This will include an analysis of legal and policy responses and posture as it pertains to denial of service attacks and other forms of attack that could adversely affect such infrastructures. Building on an understanding of the current situation, the project will consider the likely implications in terms of infrastructure protection activities and the ongoing development of a robust national information infrastructure, of further technological convergence and growing mutual reliance between India and Australia. The project will identify and analyse areas that may require a change in regulatory posture. This will inform policy and regulatory development in both India and Australia with a view to enhancing legal harmonisation, consistency and cooperation.