Intrusion Detection System
The coursework task for CS241 Operating Systems and Networks was to create an program which would examine all packets flowing through a system to check for suspicious activity. This was done using the libpcap library for intercepting the packets and POSIX threads for multithreading. The system had a couple of extra features beyond the specification, including live output statistics, full logging and configurable thread count. A full report was also written detailing my choices when designing and implementing the system.
I was able to create a very efficient solution by creating a threadpool-based program utilising semaphores instead of mutex locks to avoid the use of inefficient busy-wait loops. I tested the system under a high load of streaming 8K video on YouTube, producing thousands of packets per second which the program was able to easily handle.
The final result was fully functional and received a mark of 97%, for which I also received the 2nd place prize for best coursework in the year group.
This project improved my confidence and ability of programming in C massively, as it was relatively complex and non-trivial, especially compared to earlier work I had done in C.
Unfortunately the source code for this project is not publicly available due to plagiarism concerns.
A sample output of the program is shown below.
