Introduction

The goal of this milestone is to first identify the topic you would like to work on and then to collect a list of 10 academic papers that you would like to refer to when doing your research and literature survey. In other words, you should get yourself excited about a certain topic in network security and get motivated to read papers and learn about this topic. Reading the papers will help you master the topic so that you can identify gaps in the area of research and then propose a methodology for tackling them. By the end of this milestone, you should have convinced yourself, and your instructor, of the importance of the topic you have selected in the realm of network security.

This milestone is broken down into two steps: (1) you will first identify a topic that excites you and you’d like to learn more about and (2) you will collect a list of (at least) 10 academic papers that directly deal with your topic.

Step 1: Milestone 0

In this first step, we would like to identify a topic that you feel excited about and are motivated to become a master of. In order to do so, you must be familiar with the current trends in research and what the people in the field of network security are currently interested in. This will give you an idea about what topics are considered important by the community at this time, and what challenges need a solution.

• Take a look at the list of conferences below. It is a list of the top conferences in the field of network security and computer security in general.
• Identify a general topic that you are interested in researching more.
• Identify at least two papers that deal with the topic you are interested in, preferably from two different conferences.
• Identify a potential idea that you might want to work on in this topic. This can be as vague as “making a better firewall” or “designing an adaptive network”.
• Write a short paragraph motivating why the area you selected is important and what are its impacts on the state of network security.

List of conferences

Below are links to the 2021 edition of the top conferences in systems and network security.

• The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
• The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
• Usenix Security Symposium
• The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
• ACM SIGCOMM
• The Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
• The Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
• The International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
• The Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
• The IEEE Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
• The International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses

Step 2: Milestone 1

After selecting your topic of interest, it is now time to start looking into what researchers are currently doing in that area, so you can identify one or more gaps in the current approaches and then propose a novel approach to tackle these gaps. Reading these papers is going to help you gain a deeper understanding of the topic you have selected.

• For this milestone, you will need to identify at least 10 papers that are relevant to you chosen area of research.
• For each paper, write one small paragraph the quickly describes the paper and what it is attempting to do (no need to go into detail at this stage, just what you can gain from reading the abstract and the introduction of the paper).
• Your papers must be published in the last five years or have a substantial amount of citations that make the paper foundational to the topic.
• You might find Google Scholar very helpful in your quest related papers and determining citation counts.

Here are a few guidelines to help you identify papers that are relevant for you to read:

• How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav
• How to Read a Scientific Paper by Drs Wollowski and Yoder.

Submission

• Both milestones 0 and 1 are due on April 22 at 11:59 pm.
• Submit a single pdf document to gradescope that includes:
  • The topic that you have identified in Step 1.
  • The 10 papers that you have collected in step 2.
  • A paragraph about each paper describing how it is relevant to your topic of choice.

Grading

This milestone is to be graded as Pass/Fail. To pass this assignment, you must meet 100% of the specifications below. Otherwise you will fail the assignment. In that case, you will received feedback on you submission and will have another chance of submitting again for credit.