6th Annual GradSec Symposium

Tuesday December 5

Session 1: AI-enabled Attacks

  • GPT Goes Phishing
    Nathalie and Annie
  • Evaluations on ML-based attacks on LWE
    Emma and Kasra

Session 2: Problematic Prompts

  • Don't Push Your Ad Around
    Prajwal, Nehal, Jeovane
  • LLM Prompt Fingerprinting
    Evan, Elan, and Addison

Thursday December 7

Session 3: Resisting Reconnaissance

  • CookieFreeze: A First-Party Cookie Tracking Mitigation Tool
    Simge and Adrien
  • Sybil Attacks on Monero
    Shayan

Session 4: Feeling Fuzzy

  • Re-Evaluating Fuzz Testing
    Xiaolong and Dev
  • TLS Geneva
    Freddy

Final Projects

The bulk of your work in this class will center around a final project. The goal of this course project is for you to get experience doing security research by working on an open problem. It should also be a problem that's interesting to you: you will pick it, but I am happy to discuss project ideas with you.

Ideally, several (possibly workshop) publications will come out of this class. To this end, there will be several milestones throughout the semester to help make sure that you are making progress.

Any point throughout the semester, you are welcome to come meet with me to discuss ideas, or if you need advice.

10/17 (in class)   Project pre-proposal presentations

Make a short presentation about your intended project to solicit feedback from your classmates.

  • Keep your presentation to 5 minutes, plus Q&A.
  • Describe the problem you want to solve.
  • Provide some context to the problem in terms of background and related work.
  • Describe how you plan to:
    • Solve the problem
    • Evaluate your solution
    • Address potential ethical concerns
  • Give feedback to your classmates about their projects.

12/05 & 12/07 (in class)   Project presentations

The final two days of class will be the 6th Annual UMD GradSec Symposium. Each group will deliver a 10 minute presentation on their work, followed by Q&A. The program will be announced closer to that day.

12/13   Project writeups

Email Dave your final project writeup. This writeup should largely reflect the style and substance of a workshop or conference submission. It should not exceed 8 pages (not including references and appendices). It should include:

  • An abstract summarizing the work.
  • An introduction that motivates the problem and your approach.
  • A related work section that puts the work into context and differentiates your work from others'.
  • One or more sections describing your solution, study, design, etc.
  • One or more sections describing your results, evaluation, findings, etc.
  • A brief conclusion and future work section describing what remains to be done.
  • References and citations.

Note All attacks must be performed in an ethical, safe manner; please see the discussion of legality and ethics in the syllabus.

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