Biography

Stefan Stafrace obtained a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and A.I. from the University of Malta in 2002.  He has then worked as a database administrator/software developer with one of the leading mobile telecommunications operator in Malta for the following 5 years. In 2007 he decided to move to the U.K. to pursue an MSc degree in I.T. Security Technologies and Applications at the University of Surrey.  He completed the degree with distinction and was awarded a full scholarship to proceed onto a PhD at the University of Surrey with expected completion date of March 2012.

Research Interests

WAHN present a very challenging environment when compared to traditional wired networks.  The wireless communication is done over a shared medium, which makes it practically impossible to establish a network perimeter or determine specific 'choke' points to control the network traffic.  Furthermore, nodes in a WAHN are usually resource constrained making them very limited in the operations that can be carried out. Consequently conventional IDS cannot be deployed on WAHN, thus researchers have sought alternative solutions, including the use of agent-based IDS.  

My PhD research is focused on optimising agent-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) for wireless ad hoc networks (WAHN) by applying concepts and principles inspired by the miltary domain as laid out in the "Art of War" by Sun Tzu.  In the past years this piece of literature has been applied to management strategy, similarly we apply the same concepts to manage effciently and effectively the intrusion detection operations conducted by the software agents.

I am supervised by Dr Bogdan Vrusias (principal), Dr Lee Gillam (secondary) and Dr Nick Antonopoulos (External Collaborator).

Publications

Stefan K. Stafrace, Nick Antonopoulos, Military tactics in agent-based sinkhole attack detection for wireless ad hoc networks, Computer Communications March 2010, Vol 33, Issue 5, Pages 619-638, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2009.11.006

I presented my research at the following conferences:

7th Annual PhD Conference (March 2010)
RUSI Conference - Science and Technology for Security (June 2011)
USENIX Security (August 2011)

Teaching

I assisted in the following modules:

Web hacking countermeasures - Profiling, SQL injection, Cross Site Scripting, etc
Enterprise Systems Development - Spring and Hibernate Framework
Database and Information Modelling - SQL
Object Oriented Software Engineering - Java based
Web Technologies - Client-side technology (Javascript and AJAX) and Server-side technology
(XML, Servlets, JSP, Web services etc)
Database and Knowledge Discovery - Business Intelligence

I am also part of a team that delivers intensive induction courses to MSc students as a foundation tothe postgraduate programme. These courses are mainly about OOP, Java programming, Matlab and mathematics.

Departmental Duties

Oct 2008 - Present:      Student teaching assistant
Jan 2009 - Jan 2011:    PhD Student representative

Affiliations

I am a member of ISACA, which awarded me with the Certification for Information Systems Auditor (CISA) since June 2005.