Term Paper

Proposal due 11:45PM

Paper due 11:45PM

• Bruce Schneier (list of publications, DBLP list).
• Michael Reiter (list of publications, DBLP list).
• Gene Tsudik (list of publications, DBLP list).
• Adrian Perrig (DBLP list).

These authors will be referred to as approved authors below.

In this paper, you are expected to present a coherent idea (which does not have to be original) and support the idea with references (citations). You can have many references, but at least three of them must be authored or co-authored by an approved author and be published in a peer-reviewed journal, conference, or a workshop (technical reports, web articles, and whitepapers are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, do not count here). What you should not do is to say, "I've read the following 3 papers and here's what they said." Please also do not count the Applied Cryptography book as one of the required 3 references.

Please focus of the technical aspects of security systems as oppose to social, political, and economic aspects.

The term paper must be 5 pages or less, [BC: Changed 4/17/2006] with a list of references which may extend beyond the end of the 5th page. (Although you may have appendices beyond the 5 page limit but you should not expect your reader to read the sppendices.) The smallest acceptable point size is 10. The formating requirement is fairly flexible. You may format the paper in single column, double columns, singly spaced, or doubly spaced. Please note that the only allowed file formats are ASCII text, PDF, Postscript, and HTML. Please name your submission as either termpaper.txt, termpaper.pdf, termpaper.ps, or termpaper.html, respectively.

Citations (or references) must be done properly. Please use the same format as the reading list for this class (except that you can use numbers for identifiers).

Please write your proposal in ASCII text and e-mail it to both the TA and the instructor. The approval will come from the TA. You may submit your proposal as early as you want and you may start working on the term paper as soon as your proposal is approved.

Although your proposal will not be graded, you will lose 20 points (out of 100) if you do not submit a proposal that meets the reference requirement by the proposal deadline.

You must now write a paper on the topic you selected in your proposal. The purpose of the term paper is for you to become an expert on the topic you selected. The term paper should be written so that it conveys information to the reader. When grading the paper we will ask ourselves whether other students in the class might learn about the topic you choose by reading your paper. The paper should contain original analysis of the papers you choose to cover, and ideally suggest directions for future research on the topic.

In writing your paper you should use the several assigned readings from the course as a guide of what is expected of you. You should also use the papers in the readings as a guide to what is expected in terms of properly citing other works.

We realize that some of the students in CSci530 have not been required to submit research papers in other classes that they have taken. For those of you who have not written a research paper before, we urge you to utilize the resources of the Engineering Writing Center or the USC Writing Center.

Generally, the a term paper would fall into one of the following categories:

Grade		Points		Rationale
A+		50		great paper (this is very rare)
A		44		very well written and clear paper, good technical depth
A-		38		fairly well written paper, got the point through, probably not enough technical depth
B+		30		so-so paper, not very exciting, does not make a clear point, looks like a laundry list or an enumeration of facts, not enough technical depth
B		24		not much to say or poorly written, doesn't look like much time was spent on it, no technical depth
B-		18		(bad)
C+		10		(worse)
C		4		(really bad)

• ACM conferences on security related topics: (Note: this link is slooooow.)
  • Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
  • Workshop on Multimedia and Security
  • Workshop on Wireless Security (WiSe)
  • New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW)
• IEEE conferences on security related topics:
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy (click on Calendar of Events and Call for papers linkes)
  • IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW)
• USENIX Security Symposium (2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, etc.)
• Mihir Bellare's cryptography and security related conferences page

1. A good paper.

2. Clearly written and technically sound.

3. Nice presentation and critical in evaluating your idea.

4. Your paper should not look like an enumeration of facts.

5. Your paper should not look like a laundry list or a table of contents for another paper!

6. The paper needs to "say something" or "make a point" (have your friends read it, if they don't "get it", you need to make your point clearer).

7. Demonstration that you have read and understood your references.

8. [BC: Added 4/15/2006] You must give citation properly.

Late submissions will receive severe penalties. Due to clock skews, electronic submissions of projects and homeworks assignments will be accepted within 15 minutes after the specified deadlines without penalties. If your submission is beyond the 15 minutes grace period, you will receive 75% of your grade if your submission is 15 minutes late beyond the grace period; you will receive 50% of your grade if your submission is 30 minutes late beyond the grace period; you will receive 25% of your grade if your submission is 45 minutes late beyond the grace period; and you will receive a score of zero otherwise.

All submissions will be timestamped by the submission server and receipts will be issued. Whether your submission arrived to the server by the deadline is determined by the timestamp. Please keep your receipts.