So I am going to use this opportunity, before I end up eye ball deep in uni work to set out some of my hopes and plans for the coming academic year.

1. First and foremost make better use of the social resources available to me. Recently it has struck me that I really haven’t been putting enough effort into this area. So I am now in the process of setting up a twitter account and revamping my linkedin account. I will be adding links to these on the Zibit Forensics website too.

2. Revamp the Zibit Forensics website, currently under way, and look more into the idea of setting a DF Students Network. My aim here is to make it easier for students and practitioners to connect with each other, provide a single location for high quality industry specific information, work experience, project idea, seminars and course.

3. Settle on a final year project, which I am still struggling to do. My main issue here is working out exactly what sort of project would be relevant. I really don’t want to do something that is been done to death, though I do recognise that at this stage the likely hood of me doing something totally unique is also remote. The leading candidates at the moment is a report on the use of disposable mobile phones in criminal activity or hackIphones, a forensic nightmare? or developing  a forensic ‘test’ phone, whereby testing variable are preset for the purpose of teaching forensic techniques.

I shall leave it there for now, but I am sure that in the next week or so I will be adding to this list! I will also post an update on how the final year is progressing but that wont be until at least the third week in.

Fingers crossed in 7 days that issue will be resolved with the addition of my very own telegraph pole :0

So anyway to update, my garden is now finished and the neighbours cat now likes to use it to its business, what joy. I have now got tomatoes, peppers, chilli peppers, carrots and potatoes growing and shortly it will be time to harvest some of them.

I also now have a new project to keep me occupied, building a cabinet/shelves in the remains of a fireplace. I am looking forward to this one, not least because it doesn’t require any brick laying. It also means I can finally put my telly up on the wall and hide all my DVD’s and various other bits of tech I don’t want on show.

The Zibit Forensics website has had a bit of a surge in interest recently so I would like to appeal to those that currently make use of it to help shape its future. As I have said before I would like it to provide a wider service than it currently does, mainly aimed towards connecting students and practitioners. I am currently re-working the site, not to incorporate anything new, but to iron out old bugs and provide a framework for adding the new at a later date.

Other news…

Uni starts up again in two weeks which I am looking forward to. Why? because it means I am only 9 months away from getting my degree!

That’s right, I decided to build a ‘flower’ garden. It was mainly for Hannah so she could plant some herbs. Ok it was mainly for me, to have something to do, that didn’t involve spending all day indoors. I’ve never laid a brick before but I rather naively figured it can’t be that hard. Wrong… getting the mortar mixed is trickier than you’d think, then getting it to stay on the brick or in the right place. I now have a new respect for brick layers. I did start to get into the swing of it, but not long before I ran out of mortar, I managed to lay just 25 bricks out of the 133 I have.

So where does the fake iphone fit into all this? Well today I also had my first experience with one, by accident.  I was chatting with the chap working in my local newsagent, who asked what I had being doing today, to which I replied, brick laying.  Think that I was a brick layer, he asked if I was a builder, to which I explained about the garden project and that I was in fact a student studying Digital Forensics.

It was at this point that he produced an iphone and said he was having trouble getting the internet to work. Being the charitable type I offered to take a look at it. He then told me his friend had got it in China.  Ah!

Taking a glance at it, it looked almost perfect with the exception of a wonky Apple logo on the back. It had even been supplied in Apple packaging, with the correct instructions and accessories. Yes he showed me all that too! Could it have been possible for the software to equally good? Sadly no. The screen for a start was not as responsive and required a stylus to work effectively, swiping was therefore difficult. The home screen looks the same but simply doesn’t function the same, and the reason for no internet? Well that was two fold, one it had no browser, only and IE icon, and two, it was set up to use China mobile.

The poor chap had gone to some effort to make it work though, so it seems a shame I wasn’t really able to offer much more in the way of help. My only solution was to look at getting Android onto the phone. Which on official iphones is more that possible using openiboot.

So the moral of this story? buy more mortar and don’t buy an iphone in China. At least not unless you know what you are looking for. Things like TV tuners and dual sims don’t exist on the real thing. But I think more importantly, these phones often have malware on them, and unfortunately for the new friend in the newsagent, his did.

I am pleased to report that I had a better year than I expected, with an over all 72% pass. So I am truly happy about that, hopefully  the next academic year will  be more challenging. I am of course still stuck for a project!

I had hoped to work with an Android phone. Perhaps looking into general forensic analysis of it, but that’s been pretty much done now. I had also considered an Android based ‘anti-forensic’ mobile phone for use by government and such like. This is still a possibility but a mammoth task and maybe to big for a bachelors.

Other alternatives?

Maybe looking into current digital forensics standards and work practices, but that seems to have been done to death. Maybe analysis of another form of equipment, ipad?

In other news I am still working on http://www.hannah-roberts.co.uk website. It is coming along nicely although I am a bit behind schedule. I spent three days doing a little gardening, also known as de-foresting (the weeds).

Working on this has thrown a few things into light though, namely the lack of support for CSS3 from Microsoft. Instead having to use the truly cumbersome filters.

At the moment I am working on finding a summer/temp/part-time/any form of gainful employment. If anyone wishes to offer me a space in their organisation, I would be eternally grateful.

Aside from that I am working on a website (http://www.hannah-roberts.co.uk), it’s not live yet and probably won’t be for at least another week or so.

But that’s not all I am doing, I mean I do need to fill four whole months. So I am also re-learning German and Arabic! To this end I obtained a copy of Rosetta Stone. So far very good.

The start of the new academic year went ok, then went down hill from there. I mentioned last year the changes occurring due to Rolex, unfortunately it has created some changes to my course that on the face of it are welcome, but scratching the surface reveals an almost complete dilution of content.

I recognise the relevance of every module I do but this relevance isn’t obvious and not imparted on the year group. This however is the least of my worries.

So what are the real issues this year?

Management in Technology Innovation

Ok aside from having absolutely nothing to do with forensics in any way shape or form, the issue here is a complete lack of competence of the tutor. Day one she tells us she has a background in jewelery retail! Then disappears for 4 weeks without properly dividing the class into groups and explaining the first assignment (a group presentation).

She is back with us now and the next assessment is to produce a financial plan, much like the kind you would give to a bank when applying for finance, discussion on this topic had made it painfully clear that she has no genuine knowledge of accountancy!

Computer and Mobile Operating Systems for Forensic Examiners

A brilliant module, but no forensics. We were supposed to be using FTK extensively however the centralisation of the IT department has mean that FTK still hasn’t been installed on the lab computers. Aside from that the lecturer is fantastic, experienced, and knows what he is talking about, but has no control over the class. This module every week almost without fail is disrupted by 2 or 3 students who don’t ‘understand’ the subject and openly say that as a result “We don’t want to do this, it’s too hard”.

Security Systems Theory

Suffers a similar problem to the above. The module is divided into a lecture and a tutorial. The lecturer again a brilliant person, knows what he is talking about but delivers it in the worst possible way. This however for me is fine, I might be bored to death but I still listen and take from it what I can. The tutorial however is a farce, there is absolutely no control and for 5 months nothing has been covered at all!

Switched LANS and WANS/English Legal System

I can’t say a lot here really, these are the only modules that have run smoothly this year.

The view that I take, is that there is a 50/50 split between a students responsibility to actively research and read around their chosen subject and the universities responsibility to deliver the core material and challenge students and inspire them (the latter being quite hard to achieve). I feel that in my case the balance is closer to 90/10. Could this be my background? i.e. working as a network technician, running my own business, life experience etc. I don’t know the answer to that.

From talking with others in the group, the impression I get from them is that there is a significant gap between their desire to fulfill there responsibility and the ability of the university to fulfill its responsibility, to illustrate I would estimate the ratio as 10/10!

The slides (in PDF) are listed here.

What is Quantum Cryptography

The Future of Cryptography

Potential Limitations

I always knew that the solution was less than reliable, being free. My plan was to build up the site and when the site became a bit more established I would move it to a better solution. The site is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it is really how it should be, however after recent events with the current hosting solution I have decided now is a good time to find something permanent.

So this is what I did. I have temporarily taken down the database while I make repairs and recover the lost information. This won’t take too long and once finished the site will be available again, in a new home, and with a new name.

In the interest of growing the site beyond its current remit it will now be called The Zibit Forensics Absolute Database. There is also a new web address http://www.zibitforensics.co.uk

I hope the absense hasn’t caused people too many headaches and I promise we will have it back as soon as possible.

The full weight of what is expected of us this year hit me a few days ago after enrollment. Some of the module guides and assignment rationales were mistakenly made available to me. The advantage here is obvious, a 3 day advantage, 3 days to extract my reading list, begin planning my Security Systems project and do some advanced research on the coming lectures and labs. Score!

I wasn’t really looking forward to Switched LANs/WANs as there was some confusion at the end of last as to weather it would be relevant this year.  To cut a long story short (see RoLeX for more on that) the networking module in year one was merged into year two. Not very good for those who have already done the year one work. So it seems they accepted my suggestion that they keep it the same for us.

This years project, well I am still gathering ideas for this but I am currently leaning towards something in mobile forensics. I came across a very good idea in the desktop OS world that I could potentially  port into the mobile OS world.

I didn’t fail anyof my modules, in fact I did better than I thought I would. I wont bore anyone with the facts and figures.

It had been a fantastic year and a truely great experience considering this was the first year that the Forensics Computing course had run. There will of course be significant changes for those doing the first year come september, however from what I have seen this will be a significant improvement too.

For me it is time to prepare for year 2. The course modules have changed since I started but not too much thankfully. I have been to the library and borrowed any books that relate to the modules (I will list them here at some point). I really want to hit this year running and push to achieve the same results again (if not better).