A team of judges considered all aspects of the student posters in reaching this decision – the graphic and verbal presentation as well as the content and the research conveyed. “Benjamin's poster describes what is essentially anomaly-based detection of malicious traffic, but done by looking at the aggregate behaviour of the traffic and evaluating its variability instead of combing through the traffic itself," says Chris Lonvick, Director of Consulting Engineering with Cisco. "While it won't tell you how to fix the problem, it may help you to tell whether you have one. I thought the approach was interesting."

Benjamin showed originality and practicality in investigating a relevant problem, developing a lightweight solution that can be applied in various contexts, and presenting the results in a clear format. “His work is a novel application of technology to address a clear problem to industry,” says Chris, “the solution can be applied to current technology and its information will be useful to network operators in many sectors, including the research and education networking community.”

Lonvick goes on to say, "Cisco is dedicated to encouraging students to develop themselves. I can't think of a better place to bring these students than to the TNC where they can talk to the leaders of the NREN community and where they can attend technical sessions in areas that interest them."

As well as Chris Lonvick, the panel of judges included Klaas Wierenga and Fred Baker, both from the Office of the CTO at Cisco, Stephen Wolff (Internet2) and Lars Fischer (Chair of the TNC2010 Programme Committee). The judges and many TNC participants gave the students feedback about these innovative posters during the conference.

The winning poster can be found here: A Signature-free approach to malicious code detection by applying entropy analysis to network streams.