Project Description

The goal of this class project is to get your feet wet with the process of writing research proposals and mini research papers. This project is intended to be open-ended and to allow you to explore an area of the course material that you want to dive deeper into.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this project, you should have been able to perform the following tasks:

1. Identify a topic of interest within the realm of network security.
2. Conduct a literature review around your selected topic.
3. Explore a small area of improvement within the scope of the current research.
4. Clearly articulate your ideas to address the identified shortcomings or areas of improvement within the current research.
5. Convince your reviewers (your instructor and your peers) of the merits of your ideas and that your approach is valid.
6. Review and evaluate your classmates work and provide constructive and supportive feedback.
7. [Optional] Implement a small proof-of-concept that highlights the effectiveness of your proposed idea.

Requirements

At the end of the term, you should submit a written proposal that surveys the current research around a network security topic that interests you. Your final proposal should contain the following sections:

• An abstract that contains a short and concise description of your project.
• An introduction section in which you motivate your problem and discuss its importance and relevance. This is also where you summarize your potential suggestions and contributions. One way to think about the introduction section is for it to be your sales pitch. You have to convince us why is your problem important and why we should care about.
• A background section that discusses in details the necessary background to understand you work and your approach. This section should not contain new work, rather it should only contain background information.
• A related work section that summarizes the main contributions of each paper or related papers in the field. This section typically ends with exposing a certain gap in the knowledge addressed by the related literature.
• An approach section that details your proposed approach to addressing the gap that you identified within the related work section.
• An optional results section that showcases any preliminary results you were able to obtain for your project.
• A conclusion section where you bring all the pieces of your story together in a short descriptive paragraph.

Peer Review

A crucial part of the proposal writing process are reviews, and it would be great if you can get exposure to both writing reviews and reading and acting upon reviews. For that purpose, we will have two rounds of peer reviews where each team will review at least one other team’s proposal. Based on the collected reviews, you can then revisit your proposal and address your peers’ and your instructor’s comments.

Weekly Journals

As part of your project proposal, you should submit weekly journals that summarizes the work you have done each week in addition to any challenges you faced, and how you were able to, or plan to, overcome them. In other words, if I were to read your weekly journals, I should be able to reproduce your work, go through your thinking process, and avoid any pitfalls that might occur.

Milestones

This project is broken down into several milestones to make sure you stay up to date on your work and submit a successful proposal. Please find a short description of each milestone below:

Grading

I will grade milestones on a Pass/Fail basis, with redo opportunities for those that you do not pass. Each milestone will have its own specifications rubric which you must adhere to so that you can pass the milestone. You must meet 80% of the specifications in order to obtain a satisfiable passing grade. Please refer to the specifications on each milestone for more information.