As part of the graduation requirements for my Masters degree, SU requires that we either complete a “masters project” or a thesis. Working full time while working towards my degree has really limited my ability to interact with the faculty and get involved with their research. This has mad the thesis option difficult since most of my research interests haven’t lined up with the interests of any professors I’ve been able to interact with. So the project seemed like the way to go especially since I’m really looking forward to graduating soon 🙂
The project that I’ve settled on is a lab that hopefully will be used by my advisor, Dr. Wenliang (Kevin) Du as part of his SEED project. He’s been using these labs in his computer security class and I noticed that, though Dr. Du teaches mandatory access control (MAC) he didn’t have a lab to make the topic concrete. I’ve been working with SELinux for a while now so making this lab it seemed a good fit for me.
It turns out that others have attempted this task in the past but have run into difficulties. I haven’t had a chance to see the previous attempts but Dr. Du couldn’t use their labs because they were very long and very complicated. After hearing this my brain starts to file it away under requirements. The lab has to be “short”: something that a graduate student in computer science / computer engineering can accomplish in a two week period (that’s actually a pretty long lab IMHO).
This initial post is just a quick introduction to the topic and to a new tag on my blog. If you’re interested in following this work, subscribe to my MACSEEDLab tag. I’ll be updating this with some brain storming soon.
technomasochism 