Hi, I'm Dilara.
I'm a master's student in computer science focusing on IT security, with CompTIA Security+ and Microsoft SC-900 certifications and several years of IT support experience at a university. On this blog, I document the projects I build: what they do, the decisions behind them, and what I learned along the way.
Projects
Inkwash: breaking AI text watermarks (in progress): A lab that tests how easily watermarks like the ones AI providers embed in generated text can be removed or forged, and what a detected watermark can and cannot prove. So far it builds a green-list watermark and its detector from scratch.
Source-backed AI assistant (university team project): A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant in Java and Spring AI, built in a team during my master's at FernUniversität Hagen. It answers questions about EU legal texts, technical documentation and project files, and backs every answer with a source. My part was the pipeline from the question to the cited answer: rewriting the question into a search query, scoring and selecting the passages the model gets to see, the system prompts for four subject areas, and turning the model's output into an answer with footnotes that link to the exact article.
Mini SOC: A Python pipeline that detects password attacks in Windows login events, rates how serious each one is, and uses a local LLM to draft an assessment, without anything leaving the machine.
Cipher Breaker: A command-line tool that encrypts, decrypts and breaks classical ciphers. So far it breaks the Caesar cipher with letter-pair statistics, and encrypts and decrypts with the Vigenère cipher.
Employee offboarding automation (in progress): A Power Platform workflow that blocks accounts and revokes access the moment someone leaves, then handles the slower cleanup steps automatically.