Source
About the studentship programme:
The CSIR studentship programme is both prestigious and competitive. The benefits and features of a studentship are as follows:
Obtain a master’s degree while working as part of a research group;
Obtain exposure to a related industry and public-sector projects;
Perform research and other activities, which advance the objectives of the group; and
Obtain a degree conferred by a South African university.
Suggested themes for research:
Any topic related to network or computer security and relevant to incident response for SANReN and its beneficiaries will be considered. The following are some suggested themes that can be developed into a topic:
South African legislation affecting incident response and computer/network forensics (e.g. PoPI, ECA, etc.);
Incident management policies and/or processes (including workflows);
Computer security education, training and awareness;
Detecting malicious network activity using innovative techniques;
Network monitoring and IDS;
The performance vs security balancing act – non-intrusive defences;
Honeypot / net –related research;
Correlating vulnerability and patch information;
Incident data formats and taxonomy (e.g. IODEF);
CSIRT (computer security incident response team) metrics – how to measure the effectiveness of the capability (possibly including statistics and trend analysis);
Identifying suspicious activity in netflow data;
Automated log processing for detecting security-related events;
Development and application of related tools and/or technologies (e.g. a CSIRT toolbox).
