Port Elizabeth (PE) Technikon won Microsoft SA's Project Firefly student technology competition yesterday with the judges' attention grabbed by an intruder detection project, which uses fuzzy logic and neural network technology.

This is the second consecutive year that a team of students from the Eastern Cape institution has won the South African leg of Microsoft's international Imagine Cup. Some 50 000 students from around the world compete in the event globally. Last year, the PE Technikon team came fourth in the international event.

Project Firefly was the brainchild of Microsoft SA's developer and platform director Danny Naidoo and it was out of this that the international competition grew.

It is a software development contest that invites students to submit programming models or applications developed through the course of the academic year in three categories of development, solution and architecture.

Entries were judged on the implementation of Microsoft's .Net technologies and Web services, social responsibility and commercial value and the overall presentation by the team.

Fourth year students Robert Goss and Demetrios Loutsios created the winning PE Technikon entry, called Negpaim (New Generation Proactive Intruder Detection and Monitoring). Their solution was a hybrid intruder detection and monitoring system that alerts systems to outside intruders and internal malicious attacks and predicts the behaviour of a potential hacker.

“This combination of fuzzy logic and neural networks could possibly be a world first and it is a fitting project to represent SA at the international competition,” says Naidoo.

The students said the idea was based on their supervisor's doctoral thesis and their objective was to expand on it to see if it could work.

“The idea is to combine the rules-based procedures of fuzzy logic with that of the learning abilities of neural networks. It is called a hybrid system because it uses anomaly detection along with signature files to predict malicious activity in a network,” Goss says.

He says the system is able to employ active and passive measures to stop malicious users from sending an SMS to the administrator to automatically shut down a server or part of the network.

Paula Kotze, dean of Unisa's Computer Science Faculty and one of the judges, says: “This project speaks volumes about the enthusiasm of the students and the academic leadership shown by the institution. The project was very well put together and the presentation and the knowledge of the team was first class.”

“What they have done is remarkable. Financial services companies, especially those with sophisticated treasury systems, have been wanting a solution like this for some time, but it was considered almost impossible to find. What these students have done is mind-blowing,” says another judge Pierre du Plessis.

A special provincial award went to Xtreme Coding from the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape.