Course Project Spring 2018

Your course project should consist of original research and address an important, interesting open problem related to computer security — ideally cloud or distributed systems security. It's up to you to find a good topic, but I'd like to discuss your ideas with you in order to help refine them.

You'll be working in groups of 1–3. The larger the group, the more I'll expect you to accomplish. The end products of your project will be a 25 minute presentation given during the Tuesday of tenth week as well as a paper of 8–12 pages that aims to be of sufficient quality and novelty that it could be submitted to a workshop or conference in computer security or systems. There will also be several project milestones throughout the quarter:

Apr. 6: Preliminary written proposal

Form a group, write a 2 page preliminary project proposal, and email it to me. It should include:

• Group: Group member names and CNetIDs.
• Title: What would you call the eventual paper or product?
• Problem: A description of the problem you will address and why it is important.
• Context: A survey of related work and past approaches to the problem.
• Approach: How you will address the problem and how your approach differs from past work.
• Evaluation: How you will test how well your approach works (e.g., experimental measurements).

Apr. 9–11: Meet with me to refine idea

Schedule a meeting with me during these days to discuss and refine the idea.

Apr. 17: Finalized proposal, timeline, checkpoints, deliverables

Email me a revised 2–3 page proposal that also includes a timeline with checkpoints and deliverables at those checkpoints.

May 1: Checkpoint I

Submit a written progress report and draft related work section.

• Progress: How are you doing relative to your proposed timeline? What have you accomplished so far?
• Updated schedule: What do you have left to do? What is your updated plan for doing it?
• Obstacles: Have you encountered any unexpected problems? How will you rsolve them?
• Preliminary results: Can you draw any preliminary conclusions from your results so far? Include data.
• Draft related work section for your final paper: How does your work relate to prior work? Include citations. This means you should have already reviewed relevant literature.

May 15: Checkpoint II

Email me a second status report following the format of the first.

May 29: Project Presentation

Give a 25 minute conference-style talk on your project in class.

Jun. 6 (11:59pm): Final paper

As mentioned above, your group's final project report should be 8–12 pages and written in the style of a workshop or conference submission, like most of the papers we have read this quarter. Please include at least the following:

• An abstract that summarizes your work.
• An introduction that motivates the problem you are trying to solve.
• A related work section that differentiates your contributions.
• Section(s) describing your architecture or methodology.
• Results and/or evaluation section(s), with data or figures to support your claims as appropriate.
• A brief future work section explaining what is left to do.
• Appropriate citations and references from the literature.

Also, see this advice on writing technical articles.

Like a real workshop or conference submission, the length of your report should be 8–12 typeset pages, excluding bibliography and well-marked appendices. The paper should be written using LaTeX and should follow the sigconf template available as part of the ACM LaTeX template.

Submitting Your Work for Publication

You're encouraged to submit your paper to a workshop or conference with an appropriate deadline. A paper submission will likely require additional work after the end of the quarter. I'd be glad to discuss potential venues with you.