University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science
CS551: Security and Privacy on the Internet, Fall 2000

Manifest: Monday 18 September 2000

Assignments Due
11:59pm tonightProjects Preliminary Proposal
27 SeptemberProblem Set 2

Readings
Read before 20 September: Optional reading for more information: (see web version for links)
Questions

Useful Proof Methods
Proof by intimidation: "Trivial" or "obvious."
Proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.
Proof by omission: "The reader may easily supply the details", "The other 253 cases are analogous"
Proof by obfuscation: A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements.
Proof by funding: How could three different government agencies be wrong?
Proof by lack of funding: How could anything funded by those bozos be correct?
Proof by democracy: A lot of people believe it's true: how could they all be wrong?
Proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Icelandic Philological Society, 1883. This works even better if the paper has never been translated from the original Icelandic.
Proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience, so this is particularly useful in classroom settings.
Proof by vigorous handwaving: Works well in a classroom, seminar, or workshop setting.
Proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets, special symbols, and the newest release of LaTeX.

Selected from http://www.ai.sri.com/~luong/research/proof.html.
None of these proof methods are suggested in CS551 problem sets.


CS 655 University of Virginia
Department of Computer Science
CS 551: Security and Privacy on the Internet
David Evans
evans@virginia.edu