Course Project
Throughout the course, students will work individually or in small groups (up to 3 students) to conduct a research project on an interesting security and privacy-related problem. The project will be evaluated according to the group size. Please form your groups by Monday, April 15 and add your group in the sign-up sheet in Canvas.
Students will have the option to choose from a list of potential project topics or propose their own research idea after discussion with the instructor. Typical projects include analyzing the security or privacy of a system on any of the platforms discussed in class, developing new solutions for limitations of existing security and privacy systems, re-implementing or adapting an existing attack or defense, or conducting an in-depth survey on a topic of interest that has not been surveyed before. The students are encouraged to think about ideas that link the projects to their own research. All students/groups are required to schedule office hours with the instructor to discuss and finalize their project topic before Week 4.
Project Proposal Presentation
Each group will deliver an in-class 10-minute presentation with a 5-minute Q&A session. A representative of each group will talk about their proposed project and get feedback from the class. In the presentation, please focus on answering the following questions:- Problem - why is it important and relevant?
- Related work – what has been done before to address this problem, and what gaps remain?
- Approach and methodology – what will you do to address the gap, and why do you think it will work?
- Results – what do you expect to achieve in the project?
Project Proposal
Please write a 4-page proposal for the course project to detail the following:- Group: Group member names and netID.
- Title: The title of your project. Titles of survey projects need to start with "SoK:".
- Introduction: A description of the problem you are focusing on and why it is important.
- Background and Related Work: A survey of related work and any essential background necessary for understanding the problem.
- System/Methodology: A description of your approach to address the problem and how it addresses prior works' gaps.
- Evaluation: A description of the methods and metrics you will use to test how well your approach works.
- Results: A summary of the results you plan to achieve by the end of the quarter.
- Timeline: An overview of the subtasks for the project and their expected timeline.
Project Presentation
At the end of the quarter, all groups will present their project in an in-class 20-minute presentation, following the conference-style presentations, with a 5-minute Q&A session. This presentation should include an introduction of the problem, necessary background and related work, details of the system or methodology developed, evaluation results, potential future work, and key takeaways from the project.
Project Final Report
Please write a 10-page report of your project in the style of a conference paper (including text, figures, and references). The report should include the following sections:
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Background and Related Work
- Methodology
- Evaluation
- Discussion and Limitations
- Conclusions
Note: Both the project proposal and the final report must be formatted in two columns using the USENIX template files. Students are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX for typesetting. A sample report template is available here. Students are welcome to create a copy of this Overleaf project and use it for the project proposal and report. Here is a short guide for using LaTeX.