Final Project

As part of this course, students are expected to complete an research project relevant to this course, and submit a writeup in the style of a conference paper. If you are already working on a research project relevant to topics in this course, you are encouraged to use that research project as the final project for this course. You are allowed the same research project for both this course and another course, or complete a project for this course that overlaps with a project used for another course. In general, we expect students to complete the project in groups of 2-3 students enrolled in this course. However, if your course project is part of an existing research project, or if you are using the project for multiple courses and have a student collaborator from another course, then it is usually acceptable to complete the project individually. Completing the project individually requires prior instructor approval.

If you are using an existing project for this course, or are using the project for this course for multiple courses, you must disclose this in your project proposal and final report. The expectations for the project will usually be higher in such cases.

There are three deliverables for the final project:

1. Project proposal
2. In-class presentation
3. Final report

See the course schedule for the exact due dates.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be 1-3 pages (excluding references). In your proposal, be sure to include the following.

• Your teammates, including any collaborators/advisors outside of the course.
• Any other courses you are taking where there is an overlap between research projects, and the extent of such an overlap.
• The high-level problem you are addressing and why it is important.
• An initial study of related work and the state-of-the-art solutions for your chosen problem.
• Plans for your design, implementation, and evaluation.
• Description of work on the project completed before the course (if your final project is part of an existing research project).

You are encouraged to speak with the instructor about the ideas for your project in office hours at any time during the quarter, either before or after the project proposal deadline.

In-Class Presentation

Each project group should prepare a 12 minute presentation about their course project. Each presentation will be followed by 4-5 minutes of questions. In your presentation, be sure to do the following.

• Introduce and motivate the research question that your project aims to explore.
• Explain the existing work in this space and how it compares to your project (e.g., how your project is different from prior work).
• Describe the research idea that your project explores, and, if applicable, your contributions (e.g., the system design or cryptographic design that you are evaluating).
• Present the experiments you ran, the results of those experiments, and your interpretation of the results and conclusions (e.g., to what extent your research idea seems viable based on those results).
• Additional work that you will do before the final report deadline (if any).

Final Report

The final report should be 4-12 pages in length, in a format similar to that used in conferences in the field. For example, you may use the USENIX template. Your final report need not be as thorough as a conference paper, but it should include the following.

• Your teammates, including any collaborators/advisors outside of the course.
• Any other courses you are taking where there is an overlap between research projects, and the extent of such an overlap.
• Description of work on the project completed before the course (if your final project is part of an existing research project).
• Introduction and motivation. This should explain why the research idea you are evaluating addresses an important problem.
• Comprehensive and systematic discussion of related work, with a focus on explaining how the proposed research idea is novel in light of prior work.
• System model, threat model, and security guarantees.
• Description of your research idea and proposed design.
• Description of implementation and experiments.
• Evaluation results, interpretation of evaluation results, and conclusion.