General Information

1.    Paper Presentation 30%
2.    Project Proposal 5%
3.    Project Midterm Presentation 20%
4.    Project Research Paper 45%

Announcements

• Lecture 1 slides posted here.
• Due dates for course project deliverables posted.
  

Course Format

Course Readings and Presentations

1. Summary of the paper (~20 minutes): You will summarize the objective of the paper, the proposed technique and the results/contributions the authors have presented.  If there is background required to understand the contents of the paper, the presenter should touch upon this as well.  Either the pro or con presenter can handle this part.
2. The Pro presenter will explain what he/she thought was good about the paper, and argue for why the paper should have been accepted. (~5 minutes)
3. The Con presenter will then argue for why the paper should not have been accepted. (~5 minutes)
4. Discussion. (~10 minutes)

• Are the authors working on a real problem? What are their contributions and are they novel/useful?
• Did the authors miss any critical limitations in their paper?  Was the way they presented their evaluation honest and fair?
• Did the evaluation test the right aspects of the solution?  For example, did the presenters pick the right benchmark?  What claims to the authors make and do they justify them?
• Is the solution really novel?  Did the authors identify all related work or did they miss work that is very similar to theirs.  You should spend time doing an extended literature search for all papers ( is your friend).
• Did the authors clearly differentiate between fundamental aspects of their design as opposed to artifacts of their implementation (that might not exist on another implementation of their design)?
• In your opinion, will the solution work as the authors indicated?  Is it applicable in the general case or is it very specific to the cases they used in their evaluation?
• What questions does the paper leave unanswered?  Is there future work or is the problem essentially solved by their solution?  What improvements or additional information might you expect from the authors?  Remember that researchers frequently construct prototypes, not products, so improvements should answer important questions, not be requests for functionality that is incomplete, but would be straightforward to add.

Course Project

1. Project Proposal:
Students will hand in a project proposal on October 6th by e-mail.  The proposal should be no more than 2 pages long and should:

• Introduce and motivate the problem they are going to attempt to solve or what previously unanswered question they are going to try and answer.
• Give an outline of the proposed solution.
• Provide a list of related work and an explanation of how the advantage they believe their proposal will have over existing solutions

2. Project Midterm Update and Presentation:  Approximately midway through the course, students will also provide a written report no longer than 3 pages to the instructor summarizing their progress so far.  A class will be set aside for groups to make an oral presentations to the class explaining their project and progress made up to that point.  They will highlight interesting problems they have had and outline their plans for the remainder of the semester.  The class should comment on the project and try to give advice.  For advice on giving presentations, refer here
   

•   What problem are you solving and why is it an important problem?
•   What is the related work in the area and why is it inadequate in your opinion?
•   What is your proposed solution?
•   How will you evaluate your solution?  What results do you anticipate?

3. Project Research Paper and Presentation: Students will hand in a research paper describing their project.  The paper will be no longer than 10 pages.  The most important goal of any research paper is to confer knowledge that the author learned by doing the research onto the reader.  Thus, when writing the project research paper, students should focus on things they learned in the course of the project, that was not obvious to them before they embarked on the work.  A good research paper should:
   

• Introduce and motivate the problem the paper attempts to solve.
• Provide a description of the proposed solution, as well as any interesting implementation details of the prototype (if one was built)
• Give a critical analysis of the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of their system, making sure to differentiate fundamental limitations of the solution from limitations specific to the prototype implementation
• Conclude with no more than 3 points describing the enlightening things that were learned from doing the research.

1. Mobile device security: 
With the rapid growth in power and diversification of mobile phones, many new security problems are emerging.  Many believe that smart phones will become the primary internet device of the future.  In addition, their location sensing abilities, always-on internet connection and small size making them perfect for many new applications such as location tracking, health monitoring and mobile payments.  In this project, we wish to deal with one more several scenarios such as (but not limited to):

•  Malicious applications that infiltrate phones through social engineering or a confusing security model
•  Weaknesses in the security and protection systems on a phone that might permit malicious applications to steal information or damage privacy
•  Flaws in phone software implementation or design that allow malicious websites or networks to attack phones
•  Protection of information if a phone is lost or stolen

2. Cloud security:  As the cost and speed of bandwidth drops and the cost and complexity of device maintenance increases, distributed applications accessed through thin clients and web browsers will become the norm.  However, web browsers were never designed to be thin clients and so many interesting browser designs have emerged recently.  Design decisions include how to provide extensibility, how to handle plugins and how to isolate different web pages from each other.  Starting points include open source browsers (Firefox, Chromium  – the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser)

• How to protect against Web-based attacks, such as phishing, XSS and XSRF attacks.
• How to properly isolate plugins and extensions. 
• Fast Native code support (See Native Client)

3. Building secure Virtualizaiton infrastructure: By 2013, more than half of all workloads will be virtualized.  Virtualization frees us from having to pick one OS for each computer and forcing all applications to run on that OS.  Instead, each application to have its own operating system that is tailored to its needs.  How can we make configurable OSs that minimize the attack surface for applications?  Some old systems already proposed this ((OSKit, Exokernel)).  How do you build the modular, configurable minimal OS of the future?  Some problems are:

• Appliances need to have small memory and disk footprints.  They should boot quickly.
• It should be possible for appliances to be patched even while off. If there are many appliances, we don’t want them to have to be running all the time to be patched.  On the other hand, if you start up an unpatched appliance, you don’t want to be compromised as soon as you start the appliance.

Course Resources

Lecture Notes

• Lecture 1
  

Advice on writing/reading papers:

• How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper
• Eurosys 2006 Authoring Workshop
• Writing Systems and Networking Articles

Advice on Presentations:

• Frank Kschischang
• Compton & Chang
• David Patterson/Mark Hill

Course Schedule