Project Guidelines

Students are expected to undertake a semester long research project related to information assurance. You should work with the instructor (through email or meeting) to choose a project topic. Ideally, you should form teams of 3 students for Option 1 projects, and 1-2 for Option 2 projects.

Option 1 (survey project): You will choose a security topic and do a thorough review of the important papers in that topic. The topic can overlap with the topics covered in class. A good survey paper contains a dozens of cited papers (though, it also depends on how narrow the chosen topic is).

Option 2 (research project): For your project, you need to pick one (or multiple related papers) from a top-tier security conference published during the past five years. You need to re-implement some of the experiments of the paper and compare the results to the original paper. Additionally, you may perform follow up experiments not done by the original paper.

Notes:
  • You need to implement your own code. If the authors of the paper you have picked have released their code, you still need to write your own code, and compare the results.
  • The paper(s) you pick should have been published between 2017-2022 at one of the following conferences: (1) ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), (2) Networks and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS), (3) IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland), (4) USENIX Security, (5) Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs). You can find the full proceedings of these conferences online.

    Deadlines

    1. Introduction day (Oct 8th): Present your project idea in class (in 2-3 mins) and get feedback from the instructor and students.
    2. Project proposal due (Oct 8th): Submit a 1-page project proposal on Moodle; it should include team members' names, the paper(s) you have chosen, and a summary of your plans and objectives.
    3. Project presentations (During the last two weeks of class): Each team should present their project at the end of the semester (about 15 minutes).
    4. Final report (Dec 20th): At the end of the semester, each team should submit a report for the project, formatted in double-column ACM format. The page limit is 6 pages (excluding references). For survey reports, you can use an additional 4 pages (excluding references).