As of August the 30th I may call myself a Master of Science (MSc.). At that date I have successfully defended my thesis titled “Combating Snowshoe Spam with Fire”. People have often asked if ‘Fire’ is some kind of an acronym, it ain’t 😉

In the thesis we detail how DNS configurations may be used to track down snowshoe spam domains. Snowshoe spam spreads out the sending over a great number of hosts to reduce the volume per host, making the individual hosts harder to detect and blacklist.

My Bachelor assignment was the perfect way of deciding at which chair I wanted to follow the Electrical Engineering Master. I was interested in both the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) chair and the Telecommunication Engineering (TE) chair. Ultimately I decided to do my Bachelor assignment at the DACS chair. So I met with all the AIO’s working at DACS to see what kind of assignments they could offer me. All of the assignments were on state of the art topics. Cloud-networks for mobile providers, dimensioning link-capcity, etc. I chose to work with Rick Hofstede, his assignment was about HTTP(S) intrusion detection. His previous research was in the field of SSH intrusion detection, and he wanted to see if the same could be done with HTTP(S).