My Projects
Essential Eight Security Assessment and Implementation
I applied the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight framework to assess and improve organisational security maturity. My work involved reviewing each of the eight controls, identifying gaps, and mapping them against the Essential Eight maturity model. I accessed the ASD assessment guidelines to determine where controls were partially or fully implemented. Beyond assessment, I supported practical implementation for controls such as application control, patch management, user application hardening, and restricting administrative privileges. I also worked on governance documentation to ensure controls could be maintained and audited over time.
CIS v8 Security Posture Assessment and Gap Analysis
I worked with the CIS Critical Security Controls v8 to assess and improve security posture for a client. My focus was on analysing existing security practices, identifying gaps across the 18 controls, and determining the appropriate CIS Implementation Group. I developed pre-assessment questionnaires to gather meaningful input from the client’s IT team, then reviewed the controls in detail and provided recommendations based on the findings. Through this work, I learned how CIS offers more flexibility compared to frameworks such as NIST and ISO. I also observed that, unlike the Essential Eight, which provides more prescriptive technical guidance, the CIS framework goes deeper in scope and is better suited for medium to large organisations.
Cryptography and DES Implementation
This project was completed as part of the Cyber Security program at Curtin University. It involved analysing classical ciphers using letter frequency analysis and brute-force methods to recover the original plaintext. The project also included a full implementation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in Python, covering key scheduling, permutations, and S-box operations. Both encryption and decryption were implemented for standard text input, with testing performed on multiple files to ensure accuracy and data integrity.
