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Dipl. Ing. FH
The graduation ceremony marked the end of the Frackwoche, as well as the end of my time at the ZHW. First we had to endure one hour full of boring speeches. But then it finally got interesting. One class after the other received their diploma.
Last on the program were special awards and prices. Several students were rewarded for their excellent work in the diploma thesis. Ours was not mentioned, but that was not surprising, with such a boring topic ;). Then Swiss Engineering rewarded the student who got the best results in his/her report card... and it was me! With an average of 5.727 (out of 6) I was the best student of the whole department. I'm mighty proud of this achievement :)
Now we can finally add Dipl. Ing. FH to our business cards...Labels: graduation, ZHW
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Frackwoche
The party is over and I'm slowly recovering :). It was a blast and a fantastic experience, though we never would have expected that it led to so much work! We started very early on Monday morning and barricaded the school till 8.30am. There were two ways for students to get into the buildings:
1. Buying one of our diploma books.
2. Mastering an obstacle course with cemented boots on the feet.
Afterwards, some of us served breakfast till 10am. This was also the time when the three bars opened. One in the cellar (our bar for the day), and two on the ground floor. There was music everywhere, as well as concerts on the main stage.
The procedure was the same every day. Only the course of studies responsible for the barricades and the bars changed.
Tuesday was an easy day, because we had no duties and I used it to recover :).
Wednesday and Thursday were very busy, however. First security and then bar duty.
Pictures will follow!Labels: graduation, ZHW
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Frackumzug (Procession of Graduate Students)
A year ago I already wrote about this tradition (or old charter or something) at our university that all graduating students wear wear dress coats and beards and remodel a car. Well, this time it was my turn to participate!
It was a fantastic feeling to walk through the crowded streets, we felt like stars! Pictures can be found at the usual location ;).
This event marked the beginning of our graduation ceremonies. Next week is the Frackwoche, a one week party in the university organized by the graduating students. I may report from time to time, but pictures will have to wait till the week after.Labels: graduation, pictures, ZHW
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Diploma Thesis roundup
It's over, finally! We handed in our diploma thesis at 1pm this afternoon. Normally I'm not the guy who postpones everything to the last second; nevertheless, I only ended up in bed at 4am/3am the last to nights. Compared to others, who have been working straight for 36 hours, that's not too bad though, at least I got a couple of hours of sleep. Still, I'm dog-tired right now.
In case you've been wondering what kept me busy for the last eight weeks you can scan our abstract:
"Implementation of a Certification Authority for ZHW
The awareness of information security has increased tremendously in the last couple of years. The most widely used standard to achieve this security is X.509 which uses certificates with a strict hierarchical trust model. However, to ensure a smooth implementation within an organisation, every individual needs to own such a certificate, the certificates have to be easily accessible and the issuing Certification Authority (CA) must be trusted by all parties.
Thus it is the goal of this thesis to implement a CA for a department of the ZHW and enable the employees to send encrypted and signed email messages. Workflows, processes and different application possibilities will be evaluated, taking into account the needs of the target group.
The result is the IKT Certification Authority, a fully integrated solution which provides certificates to all members of the IKT department and is based on EJBCA, an open source CA. The handling and presentation were adapted to suit the ZHW environment. Certificates are stored on secure crypto tokens which perform all cryptographic operations and are protected by an access code, thus preventing misuse.
Not only defining optimal processes deserved our full attention, but also implementing the user portal was vital. The main reason why implementing security solutions fail is not the missing technology, but inferior usability in the application logic. Therefore we focus on easy usability and well structured workflows. An important part in gaining the trust of users is due to the attractiveness of the portal which adheres to the corporate identity.
The authors firmly hope that this thesis lays a solid foundation for a future extension of the user base to the whole ZHW. Furthermore we hope to show that the implementation of a Public Key Infrastructure is not reserved to big companies and is feasible using open source software."Labels: ZHW
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