• Module: CMP400
• Title: Honours Project Proposal and Execution
• Overall Module Grade: A

As soon as I finished my third year I began thinking of what to choose for my Honours Project. I really enjoyed doing my mini project An Evaluation on Ransomware Prevention Methods and Techniques so decided to continue with ransomware. There was a lot of great Honours Project ideas from the lecturers at Abertay University that we could choose from. Sadly none were on ransomware. Therefore, I thought of my own idea and pitched it to one of the lecturers who was the only lecturer interested in ransomware as a research area: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Using a Modifiable Ransomware Simulation Tool.

I spent all of July and August 2022 planning my idea and by September I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a ransomware simulation tool that safely simulated aspects of a true ransomware attack with the user having full control over how the environment would play out. My full idea can be seen in my Honours Proposal below. However, I had some difficulty getting my lecturers on board with it and had to be very specific in what I was planning on doing.

To incorporate the research requirement of an Honours Dissertation to use Quantitative or Qualitative data to be used for evaluation, I decided to compare against current ransomware simulation tools available on the market right now and gather Quantitative data on the entropy calculations of the encryption algorithms used in my code.

This is what my four years of learning had led up to. I absolutely loved the freedom to explore an area I'm very passionate about on my own to contribute to this research topic. Looking back, maybe I could have explained my idea more clearly to get it green lit faster. All my proposals can be found below.

Due to the nature of my artefact I've chosen to not make it available on Github. However, the Project Artefact code can be found in Appendix F of my Dissertation.