cs6501: Security Seminar

Students in the seminar will work either alone, or in small groups, on a research project relevant to computer security. Students are strongly encouraged to find project topics that relate to their ongoing thesis research (or that will help them find a thesis topic if they are currently searching for one).

Projects are expected to be research projects. (If you have an idea for a project that is not a research project, discuss it with me early to see if it is appropriate.) Research projects should start by posing a question no one is able to answer today, explain why it is worthwhile to answer that question, and produce theoretical and/or experimental results that help answer that question. Projects should include a summary and analysis of related work, but that should not be the primary focus of your work.

Your project may be on any topic that you can convince the seminar coordinator is relevant to computer security and will be interesting and worthwhile. The scope of your project should be small enough so that you can complete it this semester, but large enough so a successful project will have external impact. Projects can (and hopefully will) include larger issues that will be addressed after the seminar ends to make your results ready for submission to a conference or workshop. The best projects should lead to conference papers. All project proposals should describe work that could lead to a externally publishable paper if successful.

Deliverables

Friday, 25 September: One page project mini-proposal
Tuesday, 29 September (and any class after): Elevator speeches
Tuesday, 13 October: Project proposal
Tuesday, 8 December: Project presentations
11 December: Project final report

Mini-Proposal

Your mini-proposal should describe the question you intend to answer, and why it is interesting. Your mini-proposal should also explain how the project relates to the research you are already doing (or planning to do). Mini-proposals should be submitted by email (as plaintext or a PDF attachment) by Friday, 25 September.

Elevator Speeches

Imagine you are in an elevator with a very busy, rich and important person. You have ninety seconds (elevators in buildings with rich and important people in them tend to be faster than the one in our building) to convince her your project is so exciting she should read your proposal and consider funding it generously. In ninety seconds you should be able to explain the problem you hope to solve, why it is interesting (to someone not an expert in your area), and what you are doing to solve it. A successful elevator speech elicits a question from the listener after the elevator doors open; an unsuccessful one drives the listener away as quickly as possible.

At any class on or after 29 September, we may pseudorandomly select students to give elevator speeches about your project. Being able to give a good elevator speech may be even more important to your future career in research or industry than being able to do good research and write well, so it is worth practicing this whenever you get the chance.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should include:

Clear Statement of the Problem — what question is your project seeking to answer? If your project is successful, what will the research community know after you are done that it does not already know.
Motivation — why is your problem interesting and important?
Related Work — this doesn't need to be complete yet, but should be enough to show the problem is relevant and interesting and make it clear what has and has not already been solved by other researchers. You should make sure to relate the related work to your project, not just summarize a lot of papers you have read. For every work you describe, your related work section should explain clearly why it is relevant to what you want to do.
Research Plan — concrete description of what you plan to do. Your research plan must include clear milestones for every week until the end of the project.
Evaluation — description of how you will decide if the project is successful. How do you know if you have answered the problem question? Note that your project does not need to be a successful research project to satisfy the requirements for the course project, but you do need some way of evaluating the success of your project.

We expect most project proposals will be about 5 pages long, but there is no strict length requirement or expectation.

Presentations

All students will be required to make a conference-style presentation about their project. More details on the presentations will be available later in the semester.

Project Reports

Final project reports are due by Friday, 11 December (4:59pm). You should turn in a paper printout of your report at my office and email me a URL for your project report (which should be either .html or .pdf). I will read the paper you turn in, but make the web reports available from the course site.

The final report should motivate, describe and evaluate your work. You may organize your final report into sections as you see fit. It should include (but is not limited to):

Problem: A clear description of the problem you are addressing. It should motivate your work by arguing that this is an important problem and that there is no satisfactory solution.
Related work: A good summary and analysis of the work relevant to your project. Everything you describe should be related directly to your project:
- Why is it relevant? (Don't assume the reader can read your mind.)
- If it attempts to solve a similar problem, why is it not a satisfactory solution?
- What ideas in the other project can be applied to your project?
Solution: Describe what you did to address the problem. This section should make it clear what exactly you did, and how it relates to the problem you motivated in the first section.
Evaluation: Analyze the success of your solution. This section should provide objective and subjective arguments showing how well your solution addressed the problem. You should have some substantial support for your arguments, but it is not unacceptable to conclude that more work needs to be done to produce a definite evalution, and describe what additional work is needed. (In many cases, I hope you will want to pursue this additional work after the seminar and work towards a publishable paper.)
Conclusion: What can the security community learn from your work? Your conclusions should be supported by your evaluation section.