Manifest: Monday 26 November 2001

Assignments Due

• Now: Problem Set 5
• Wednesday, 28 November - Monday, 3 December: Project Presentations
• Wednesday, 5 December, 2:05 PM: Project Final Report
• Monday, 10 December, 5:00 PM: Take-Home Final Due (will be handed out 5 December)

Project Presentations

Each presentation will be strictly limited to thirteen minutes. If you plan ahead and use your time wisely, this is plenty of time.

Your presentation need not involve all team members speaking, but all members of your team should contribute to developing it.

The goal of almost all presentations is to get your audience interested enough in what you are talking about that they will want to learn more. For your project presentations, the goal is to make your audience understand and remember the most important idea from your project. You cannot expect to convey a lot of technical information (that's what the report is for), but you should be able to motivate your work and convince your audience why it is important and interesting, make it abundantly clear to your audience what you actually did, and explain one nugget that came out of it.

Your target audience for this presentation is the other students in the class. You should assume your audience knows everything covered in CS588 (but perhaps remind them briefly of important things relevant to your presentation).

All talks should tell a story. Don't fall into the trap of reading a list. All good stories:

• Introduce characters (e.g., rabbit). Characters may be familiar creatures or abstract things. If your characters are not cute and furry, you need to give your audience a reason to care about them.
• Describe an important problem (e.g., fox wants to eat rabbit)
• Relate events related to resolving the problem (rabbit tells fox about thesis). Sometimes the problem is resolved, sometimes bigger problems are introduced.
• Draw a general conclusion that is supported by your story (moral)

Your project presentation (and nearly all other presentations you give!) should follow this model.

• Introduction
  • Introduce characters: motivate your work
    • Convey why the problem you are solving is interesting, important and exciting
    • Place your work in context: how is it different from what others have done
  • Give the audience a reason to listen to the rest of your talk.
• Guts
  • Explain what you did
    • Don't be comprehensive - get the big picture across
    • Use pictures, one clear example (maybe two if necessary), etc.
  • Convey one technical nugget - show one neat concrete thing that came out of your work.
  • Analysis
    • Did your work solve the problem?
    • What are the important results of your work
• Conclusion - Summarize your project with one key point. If your audience remembers one thing from your talk, you have succeeded.

Presentation Schedule

Wednesday 28 November

Team 1 - Timing Attacks
Team 3 - Group Communication System for Ad-hoc Wireless Networks
Team 5 - Video Steganography
Team 7 - UVa Healtcare System: Medical Privacy
Team 9 - Cookies for Authentication

Monday 3 December

Team 2 - CipherChess
Team 4 - SSH Keystrokes
Team 6 - De-Clawing Carnivore
Team 8 - National ID Card
Team 10 - Digital Watermarking for Music

Project Reports

Your project reports are due 5 December at the beginning of class. Except in the most dire of circumstances, I will be unwilling to accept any reports after 2:05 on Wednesday, 5 December.

You should turn in a paper printout of your report, and a URL for your report (which should be either .html or .pdf). I will read the paper you turn in, but make the web reports available from the course site.

Like talks, papers should also tell stories. Your reports should include substantial technical details, though.

The final report should motivate, describe and evaluate your work. You may organize your final report into sections as you see fit. It should include (but is not limited to):

• Problem: A clear description of the problem you are addressing. It should motivate your work by arguing that this is an important problem and that there is no satisfactory solution.
• Related work: A good summary and analysis of the work relevant to your project. Everything you describe should be related directly to your project:
  • Why is it relevant? (Don't assume the reader can read your mind.)
  • If it attempts to solve a similar problem, why is it not a satisfactory solution?
  • What ideas in the other project can be applied to your project?
• Solution: Describe what you did to address the problem. This section should make it clear what exactly you did, and how it relates to the problem you motivated in the first section.
• Evaluation: Analyze the success of your solution. This section should provide objective and subjective arguments showing how well your solution addressed the problem. You should have some substantial support for your arguments, but it is not unacceptable to conclude that more work needs to be done to produce a definitive evalution, and describe what additional work is needed.
• Conclusion: What has the security community learned from your work? Your conclusions should be supported by your evaluation section.

There are no length constraints for the final report, but you should aim to be as concise, clear and organized as possible. The writing and presentation should be at a high quality. It would be highly worthwhile to exchange reports with a classmate and review each others reports before submitting them.

Note: I will be intolerant of sexist language in your reports and deduct 5 points from any report that carelessly or systematically uses sexist language. See Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language if you don't think this is important.

Links

Firewalls
• Internet Firewalls - Resources from Purdue COAST
• Check Point Software Technologies
  Intrusion Detection
• Intrusion Detection FAQ
• Counterpane Internet Security
  Computer Immunology
• Stephanie Forrest's Home Page
• S. Hofmeyr and S. Forrest, Architecture for an Artificial Immune System, 1999.
• Computer Immune Systems

Questions

• What is a firewall?
• A what network layer should a firewall operate?
• What should a good talk accomplish?
• Why is intrusion detection useful?
• Why is intrusion detection (almost?) impossible?
• How do immune systems work? How can computers mimic biological immune systems?

University of Virginia Department of Computer Science CS 588: Cryptology - Principles and Applications

David Evans evans@virginia.edu