Reading Responses

Most classes, there will be one or two papers assigned as required reading (those sidelined in blue below). Ahead of time, each student will individually submit responses to the readings.

As a rough guideline, think about it as if you just saw the paper at a conference and were explaining it to someone in the field. What's the gist, what's the idea, how well did they demonstrate it, and what did you particularly enjoy/take issue with — these are all fine things to include.

Class HotCRP

For each required paper, we will provide you with specific questions to respond to:

  • The responses should comprise 1-2 paragraphs per paper.
  • The goal is not to prove that you read the paper, but that you understand the paper.
  • So that I have time to read them and give feedback, please turn them in by 5pm the day before class (5pm Monday for Tuesday classes, and 5pm Wednesday for Thursday classes).

8/30 Introduction

9/1 Ethics & Law in Security Research: Background

9/6 Ethics & Law in Security Research: Case Studies

9/8 Cryptography Intro / TLS

9/13 The Certificate Ecosystem

9/15 Crypto Failures in Practice

9/20 Building Anonymity

9/22 Breaking Anonymity

9/27 Censorship Resistance

9/29 Protocol Obfuscation

10/4 Botnets

10/6 User Authentication

10/11 Usable Security

10/13 Project Proposals

10/18 Classic Memory Attacks/Defenses

10/20 Modern Memory Attacks

10/25 Modern Memory Defenses

10/27 Malware

11/1 Machine Learning Security

11/3 Privacy Attacks on Machine Learning

11/8 Classic Web Security

11/10 Modern Web Security

11/15 Networking Intro

11/17 TCP/IP Security

11/22 DoS Attacks

11/24 Thanksgiving

11/29 VPNs

12/1 Underground Economies

12/6 Project presentations (1/2)

12/8 Project presentations (2/2)

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