Security final year project ideas
Free cyber security final year project ideas on Sefism for CS and software engineering students, each scoped for a single semester with a suggested stack and deliverables.
- 300 project ideas
Ideas and guidance, not finished projects
These are project ideas and scoping guidance, published free for students to use as a starting point. I do not build, write, or sell final-year projects, and I do not complete coursework for anyone. Take an idea, make it yours, and build it.
36 ideas · page 1 of 2
Tamper-Resistant Dynamic Payment QR Display with Voice Confirmation for Small Shops
Printed payment QR stickers at small shops can be covered with a fraudster's sticker, and fake payment screenshots fool busy shopkeepers. Build a small counter device with a screen that shows a fresh, signed QR for each sale, and a speaker that announces confirmed payments only after the shop's own account receives them. Threat-model the attacks, build the device, and test it against sticker swaps and fake confirmations.
Privacy-First Legal Aid Intake and Case Routing for NGO Legal Clinics
NGO legal clinics and university law clinics in Pakistan, India, Nigeria and Kenya take requests by phone, walk-in and WhatsApp, and sensitive details about domestic abuse, labour disputes or police cases end up in personal phones and spreadsheets. Build a secure intake system with a guided form, issue classification into a standard legal taxonomy, routing to the right volunteer lawyer, and strict access control, encryption and audit logs. Threat-model it before writing code.
PII and Secret Leak Audit for LLM Chat Logs and Traces with Retention Rules
LLM apps log everything: prompts, retrieved chunks, tool results and answers. Those logs quietly fill up with phone numbers, CNIC numbers, addresses, API keys and other users' data. Build an auditor that scans existing LLM traces, finds personal data and secrets in English, Urdu and Roman Urdu, shows where each leak entered the pipeline, and enforces retention and masking rules going forward.
Roman Urdu Jailbreak and Policy Drift Red Team for Customer Service Chatbots
Customer service chatbots are tested in English, then deployed to users who write in Urdu, Roman Urdu and a mix of all three. Build a red-team harness that checks whether a bot stays inside its own written rules (no promises it cannot keep, no advice outside its remit, no leaking its instructions) when attacked in local languages and code-switched text, and produces a scorecard the business can act on.
Hallucinated Package Guard for AI Coding Assistants (Slopsquatting Defence)
AI coding assistants sometimes suggest packages that do not exist. Attackers can register those names and wait. Build a guard that checks every new dependency added to a project, by a person or an AI, against the real registry: does it exist, how old is it, who maintains it, does it look like a typo of a popular package, and was it suggested by an AI? It runs in the editor, as a pre-commit hook and in CI.
Hidden Instruction Scanner for Documents Before They Enter a RAG Knowledge Base
Build an ingestion-time scanner that inspects PDFs, Word files, web pages and spreadsheets before they are chunked into a RAG knowledge base, and finds text a human cannot see but a model will read: white or tiny text, invisible Unicode, instructions hidden in metadata, alt text and comments. Suspicious files are quarantined with a highlighted preview so a person decides. It closes the door that indirect prompt injection walks through.
Content Credentials Checker for AI-Generated Images in Newsrooms
Newsrooms and fact-checkers receive images every day over WhatsApp and social media and must decide quickly whether they are real, edited or AI-generated. Build a desk tool that reads C2PA Content Credentials, checks for known AI watermarks and metadata, explains in plain language what can and cannot be concluded, and keeps a verification log for each image.
Team-Wide MCP Configuration Inventory and Least-Privilege Auditor
Developers now plug MCP servers into Claude, Cursor, VS Code and other AI tools with a few lines of config, often with a full-access GitHub token, a whole home folder as the filesystem root, and an unpinned package run with npx. Build an auditor that collects MCP configurations across a team's machines, inventories every server and credential, scores each against least-privilege rules, and proposes a tighter config.
Signed Build Provenance Gate for a Company's Internal Packages and Container Images
Build a gate that lets a small company prove every internal package and container image was built by its own CI from a reviewed commit, and blocks anything that was not. It uses keyless signing from the Sigstore project and SLSA-style provenance, wrapped into a setup a team can adopt in an afternoon. Deployments and installs check the signature and the build record before they proceed.
Home and Small Office Network Device Audit on a Raspberry Pi
Build a Raspberry Pi box that a family or small office plugs into their router to find every device on the network and check it for the common problems: default passwords, open remote access, outdated firmware and unencrypted traffic. Results come as a short plain-language report with fixes for each device. It is aimed at cheap cameras, routers and smart plugs that nobody ever updates.
Phone Spyware Check Kit for Domestic Abuse Support Workers, in English and Urdu
Build a laptop-based kit that a trained support worker uses to check a survivor's Android phone for stalkerware, risky dual-use apps, unknown device admins and account access the survivor did not set up. It runs over a USB cable without installing anything on the phone, and explains results in plain English and Urdu. It follows the clinical computer security approach developed by researchers at Cornell Tech.
Browser Extension Update Watchdog That Flags Risky Changes Before They Reach Company Laptops
Build a service that tracks every browser extension used across a company, downloads each new version when it is published, and diffs it against the last one: new permissions, new remote hosts, new obfuscated code, a change of owner. Risky updates are flagged before staff browsers install them. It targets the attack in which a trusted extension is hijacked and pushed to its existing users.
Helm Chart Permission Analyser That Finds Kubernetes Cluster Takeover Paths Before Install
Build a tool that reads a Helm chart before it is installed and works out whether the permissions it grants could let an attacker who compromises one of its pods take over the whole cluster. Many third-party operators and add-ons ask for far more access than they need. The analyser explains each dangerous permission, the attack path it opens and a narrower alternative.
Breached Password and Credential Stuffing Guard Middleware for Small Web Apps
Build drop-in middleware for Express, Django or Laravel that protects login and sign-up forms in two ways: it refuses passwords that appear in known breaches using a privacy-preserving lookup, and it detects credential stuffing attacks from patterns across many login attempts. It is aimed at small e-commerce, school and clinic sites that cannot afford an enterprise bot management product.
Broken Object Level Authorization Tester for REST APIs That Runs in CI
Build a tester that reads an API's OpenAPI specification, logs in as two different users, and checks whether user B can read, change or delete user A's records by swapping IDs. Broken object level authorization tops the OWASP API Security Top 10, and it is easy to miss in code review. The tool runs on every pull request against a test environment and reports each leaking endpoint with the exact requests.
MCP Server Behaviour Sandbox That Checks Tools Do What Their Descriptions Claim
Build a sandbox that installs a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, calls every tool it offers, and records what each call really does: files read, processes started, hosts contacted. It then compares that behaviour with the tool's own description and flags the gap, such as a 'weather' tool that reads your SSH keys. Developers get a behaviour report before they connect an AI agent to a server they found on GitHub or npm.
Loan and Wallet App Privacy Label Checker That Compares Claims With Real Traffic
Build a test bench that installs Android finance apps, records what they request, store and send, and compares that with the Data Safety section each app declares on Google Play. Predatory loan apps in Pakistan have harvested contact lists to harass borrowers, and the declared labels are often incomplete. The output is a per-app evidence report useful to researchers, journalists, regulators and careful users.
Vulnerable Function Reachability Checker for JavaScript and TypeScript Dependencies
Build a tool that tells a JavaScript or TypeScript team whether their code actually calls the vulnerable function behind each dependency alert, not just whether the package version is affected. Go has this built in with govulncheck; the npm world mostly does not have a free equivalent. The result is fewer, more trustworthy alerts, with a call path as evidence for each one that matters.
Third-Party App Access Auditor for University and School Google Workspace Accounts
Build a tool for university and school IT teams that lists every third-party app students and staff have connected to their Google Workspace accounts, ranks them by the data each can reach, and flags risky grants such as full Gmail or Drive access to an unknown app. It turns Google's raw token reports into a weekly review with one-click actions. Most institutions have never looked at this list.
Prompt Injection Regression Test Harness for RAG Support Chatbots
Build a CI-friendly test harness that small product teams point at their own retrieval-based support chatbot before every release. It checks the bot against direct and indirect prompt injection, sensitive data leakage and unsafe output handling, mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, and produces a scored report that shows whether the latest prompt, model or document change made things better or worse.
Prompt Injection Red-Team Harness for Tool-Using AI Agents
Build an open source harness that attacks tool-using AI agents with indirect prompt injections hidden in emails, web pages, files and MCP tool results, then measures both how often attacks succeed and how much useful work the agent still completes. Test three defences on real agents and publish the results as a reusable benchmark for small teams.
Model File Supply Chain Scanner for Open Model Downloads with an AI Bill of Materials
Build a scanner that teams run before loading an open model or dataset they downloaded. It flags unsafe serialisation formats such as pickle, reads the imports a pickle would perform without executing it, checks provenance, licence and model card completeness, pins exact revisions and produces an AI bill of materials for the project. It brings the discipline of dependency scanning to the AI supply chain.
Firewall Rule Audit Tool for Small Business Firewalls
Build a tool that imports firewall rule sets from OPNsense and Cisco ACLs, finds shadowed, redundant, overly broad and unused rules, and produces a clear audit report with suggested fixes. It turns years of rule clutter into a policy someone can reason about. A network security final year project grounded in well-known research on firewall policy anomalies.
AI Agent Tool Permission Gateway with Human Approval and Audit Log
Build a policy gateway that sits between an AI agent and the tools it can call. It enforces least privilege per tool, checks arguments against rules, acts with the signed-in user's own permissions, asks a person to approve risky actions with a clear preview, caps steps and spend, and writes a tamper-evident log of every call. A practical answer to excessive agency, the OWASP LLM risk that turns a fooled model into real damage.
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