A research-oriented project is the most significant element of your effort in the class. You undertake your project in pairs or (with instructor approval) individually. Projects may cover any topic of interest in network security, interpreted broadly (it need not be a topic discussed in class); ties with current research are encouraged.
You should start thinking of topics of interest quite early (first milestone regarding ideas is the end of the second week of class). Be ambitious! The goal in terms of depth and quality is to develop the effort to a degree that would merit a workshop-caliber publication.
Most projects will fall into one of the following general categories:
I encourage you to find a topic of high interest to you; feel free to be creative in selecting a project topic! You're welcome to pick a topic that is connected to your current research, and in general I'm happy to discuss possible topics with you in advance. (See the end of this writeup for a list of past projects to get the flavor of what students have done. I can provide more specifics about these if you'd like.)
Often you can pursue the same project jointly for two different classes. If this would be the case, you need to discuss it first both with me and with the other instructor(s).
In general, you should work in a team of two. One resource for finding a partner is posting your interests/thoughts to Piazza. Individual projects may be doable but require prior discussion with the instructor. If you want to work in a team larger than two, first talk with me about why this is appropriate and how the work will be divided.
With coauthors, I've written some papers providing advice for researchers:
The Initial Thoughts email is due the evening of Friday Jan 31.
The project proposal is due the evening of Friday Feb 14.
Post a brief summary of your project to Piazza so the other students know what you're up to. This should be written "elevator story" style, i.e., a succinct paragraph that captures the gist of what you're doing and how you're going after it, with the target audience (in terms of existing knowledge and what you think they'll find interesting) being your fellow students.
It works best if each project is its own Piazza thread, so if there are follow-on comments/questions, they are easy to associate with the particular project.
(The term "elevator story" refers to being able to explain your research in a useful way if you happen to share an elevator ride with someone you'd like to inform about it. It's for sure a useful skill to learn how to "tell the story" briefly but effectively!)
Summaries are due the evening of Friday Feb 28.
Put together a related work writeup. This writeup should reflect a solid grounding in the literature relevant for your project, written in a style similar to the related work sections in the papers we've been reading. (In your writeup, please begin by reminding me of the specifics of your project.) For each item of previous related work, briefly discuss the contributions of the paper, its relevance to your undertaking, and (if appropriate) in what ways it differs from your effort. Be concrete but concise in describing specific findings. When relevant, also discuss evaluation: how did the authors go about assessing their results? This can be very helpful in illuminating evaluation issues/approaches for your own work.
In general, you can tell if your related work framing is possibly too narrow is by looking at the citations of those papers you currently discuss. If you see that they cite tons more work that at least from their titles sound like they could be germane, then it's your task as a researcher to then track those down - ideally, all of the ones that sound like they could be relevant - and assess which ones you indeed need to read and absorb. Note, read-and-absorb here can run the range from reading in detail, similar to how you read papers for the class, to just reading sections or such, as you gauge relevance.
You then recurse on the citations in those papers, repeating the process until you converge by not finding any new papers, and/or the ones you find become only lightly related.
At this point, you've then mastered the full literature on the area you're working in (and usually gotten a bunch of new ideas about what to try or, often more importantly, not try).
When gathering these related papers, you may run across some that require payment through portals such as those run by ACM or IEEE. Note that UCB has site licenses for most of these libraries, so you should be able to readily fetch them using a campus machine/address without needing to provide payment.
You should format your writeup (11pt font or larger!), like you would for including in a paper, including citations. Be sure to consider these the pointers regarding writing technical papers, and take note of the "Regularize your bibliography" section for your citations. Include your source (e.g., LaTeX) as well as the formatted version of your writeup.
The related work writeup is due the evening of Friday Mar 6.
As part of turning in the status report writeup, include your team's availability for a meeting, which I may ask for so we can further discuss the progress of your project. Also include your presentation slot (see below) preferences.
The status report writeup is due the evening of Friday Apr 10.
Prepare a class presentation. These will be held at the end of the semester. Due to the virtual nature of the class for the remainder of the semester, your presentation will be done over Zoom using slides, similar to the remote lectures.
Schedule a practice presentation with me 3+ days prior to the class in which you'll be presenting. This means you'll need to have your talk fully drafted somewhat before the actual presentation. I will give you feedback on what works well and what can be improved; please strive to fully incorporate the feedback for your presentation to the class. For the practice presentation, be sure to number your slides so they're easy to refer to when giving feedback.
24+ hours prior to the class in which you'll be presenting, post a brief (~1-2 paragraph) description of your project to Piazza.
There's an art to scoping a presentation to effectively make use of the available time. You need to gauge what context your particular audience (here, this means your classmates) already has regarding the problem space your work addresses, and not spend time developing that broader context; at most, just remind them. However, it will (better!) be the case that your particular area has depth beyond what the average audience member knows about. You do need to frame this additional context, both in terms of what makes the problem interesting and significant, and how the problem space has been previously viewed in terms of prior work and the assumptions this work reflects.
Spend significant time framing related work. Aim to maximize the new understanding that your classmates will gain in learning about your particular research area.
You might also find it valuable to absorb this discussion of how to give a good talk.
Finally, your project report is due on Tuesday May 12, at 1PM. This deadline is hard, like those for homework assignments.
You are expected to write a technical paper, in the style of a conference submission, on the research you have done. State the problem you're addressing, motivate why it is an important or interesting problem, present your research thoroughly and clearly, compare to any related work that may exist, summarize your research contributions, and draw whatever conclusions may be appropriate. There is no page limit (either minimum or maximum), but reports will be evaluated on technical content and not on length.
If relevant, include a section where you describe how others (beyond your team) contributed both to different parts of the work and to the text in the writeup. My expectations are that the strong majority of both the work you report on and the writeup text will be yours, but it's generally okay if relatively minor subsets are from others, as long as these are flagged as such.
Be sure to pay attention to these pointers regarding writing technical papers.
Submit PDF via an email attachment. I generally review papers from hardcopy, so it needs to print clearly and with sufficiently large text and figures. If you use color figures, mention that in your cover note so I can send it to an appropriate printer. In addition, also submit your document source. It doesn't need to build (e.g., okay to leave out LaTeX packages and figures; it can be helpful to include your bib file, though).
To give you a flavor of possible projects, here are examples of what students have done in the past (note that some of these could make sense to redo or work on further, so it's okay to consider pursuing one of these):