This section contains information about the Final Year Project I am working on in order to satisfy the requirements leading to the Bachelor's Degree of Engineering.

The project is entitled "Design and Implementation of Secure Electronic Bank Systems". Don't be overwhelmed by the title itself -- the main focus of the project lies with the word "secure". Our team is only required to implement a prototype model demonstrating some basic functionalities required for a typical electronic bank system. Instead of delving into the intricacies of full-fledged online banking systems, we are going to devote extra efforts to investigate techniques that help achieve higher levels of security. Our findings will be published in this section as we are in progress.

Computer security is a subject that is closely coupled with other computer science disciplines, such as operating system design, networking, computer architecture and algorithmic analysis. Theoretical aspects of computer security include design and implementation of security protocols. In this project, security protocols would be the primary security measure, and other supporting measures like firewall and system configurations in relation to system security will also be investigated in this project.

This project also involves the design of a distributed system consisting of multiple servers which house the customers' data. A distributed scheme will not introduce a single point of failure and thus the system is more tolerant to server outages, as backup servers are now available. In a distributed system several issues must be addresses to, including synchronization among the servers and mutual exclusion in database update procedure etc.

Upon completion of the project, we are expected to:

• Appreciate the importance of computer security on our daily lives;
• Have a more thorough understanding as to how a system may be compromised;
• Increase our awareness on computer security issues;
• Put our knowledge learned about the security protocols and principles into practice and thus to understand them better on a practical setting;
• Learn the practical skills required as a competent system administrator to make the system less susceptible to remote security attacks;
• Inclusion of distributed computing concepts into system design to allow for further extensibility in system model;
• Understand the operation of typical electronic commerce systems.

This project represents the coordinated effort from two team members, namely Chan Bernard Ki Hong (me!) and Chan Ming Yuen. I am responsible for the security aspects of the system, while Chan Ming Yuen is responsible for the design and implementation of the distributed system. This project is to be completed before April 2003.

Note: This web site contains information on the part of information security only.