July 26, 2011 – Mark's IT Blog

FIT5044 – Network Security Week 11 + Review

The final week of new topics for Network Security covered Security for Large Computer Systems. This post will also contain a short review of the FIT5044 subject. The first point to consider when implementing large scale security solutions is the fast moving nature of computer security in addition to the difficulty in change associated with large business networks. Increased integration, particularly with the availability of inter-organization or publicly available services adds difficulty considering the mutually exclusive nature of security and convenience.

: source: Week 11 Lecture notes FIT5044

As can be seen there are a large number of areas were security must be actively enforce on a large network.

IDS systems to investigate:

Snort (http://www.snort.org)

Cisco IDS (http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/sqsw/sqidsz/index.shtml)

Subject Review:

FIT5044 – Network Security was my favorite subject of the MIT course thus far. It contains very interesting subject material and introduces students to topics they must independently investigate to gain proper understanding (I think all post graduate subject should subscribe to this). It is proposed that the subject should be a good addition for non-IT students however I imagine this would be quite challenging without some fundamental IT background. I recommend this subject to anyone in the MIT course.

FIT5167 – Natural Computation Week 11 + Review

Let post as I forgot to publish, the last week of new topics in Natural computation covered Recurrent networks for time series forecasting. The alternatives for structuring and feeding back previous time series are the main points of difference between methodologies.

Elman Networks:

Jordan Networks:

Fully recurrent:

: source: Week 11 Lecture notes FIT5167

These network operate very similarly to standard MultiLayer perceptrons. Self organizing maps have been proposed as one possible method for selecting input variables. Genetic algorithms were also noted as an alternative input selector.

Review of this unit:

I found the FIT5167 to be a very thought provoking subject, with excellent resource provided by the subject lecturer, Grace Rumantir. The best part of the subject was the assignments where we got some very useful practical experience constructing neural networks. With the statistical analysis that NNs allow, the skills learned in the subject can be applied to a very wide range of problems. I would recommend this subject to anyone studying MIT at Monash even if their major is not Intelligent Systems.