Final Year Project Ideas

whodafunk

Hi,

I'm doing a final year project and looking at an idea of developing a secure email client. I'm interested in the area of security and cryptography and thought the idea of a secure email client could demonstrate both of the above 2 concepts.

All components would be ran locally on a laptop for demonstration purposes. I'm looking at developing a web interface and a SQLite DB. Some programming has to be included so I am looking at possibly including some Java coding. I'm a total novice.

Just wondering if anybody could suggest some ideas? Would really appreciate any input/ideas/suggestions.

Cheers.

CreepingDeath

whodafunk wrote: »

I'm doing a final year project and looking at an idea of developing a secure email client. I'm interested in the area of security and cryptography and thought the idea of a secure email client could demonstrate both of the above 2 concepts.

It's been done already, it's called "PGP" - "Pretty Good Privacy".
It uses public/private key cryptography and has public sites/directories where you can get peoples keys to write to them. ( Only they can read it with their private keys which are not shared )

If you're interested in computer security then I'd recommend listening to the "Security Now" podcast which has been running weekly for many years and is up to about episode 445.

Some episodes dive into specific security topics.
Eg. episode 418 talks about PGP.

Also, if you do encrypt a message you will get a binary result, so you'll want to look up Base64 encoding (simple enough) to convert binary to text and vice versa.

Note that the e-mail system is inherently insecure and transmits the e-mail addresses in plaintext typically.
So you only ever encrypt the message, you can't hide who you are sending/receiving e-mail from.

partyboy690

Would you be open to other ideas around security as opposed to just an email client? I know security is a big focus for a lot of companies now and it would look good on ye ole CV