Yan Chen,
Professor
Tech L459, 491-4946. ychen@northwestern.edu
Haitao Xu, Dr.
Ford 2-205, 467-5343, hxu@northwestern.edu
Lectures: Mon and Wed 10:30-11:50am, Tech L158.
Cybercrime has exploded over the last decade. In this course, we will start with the overview of Internet security, then focus on security challenges and counter-attack schemes for two emerging and popular areas: mobile (smartphone) security, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) security. This course is intended for both CS and CE undergraduates and graduate students. During the course, we will read and discuss research papers, and identify a list of open research problems, from which the students can choose their class projects. There will be no exams. Students are encouraged to take 399/499 courses with me, and use the same project for 399/499 and this course. This course is counted for the project requirement, and the depth areas of system and securitys.
No exams for this class.
There is no required textbook. All reading will be from papers. Whenever possible, handouts and papers will be placed online on the web page. A schedule of assigned readings is available online.
To ensure lively discussions, you will be required to write a brief summary of the papers you read, to be electronically handed in by Friday midnight, via emailing to eecs450-staff@cs.northwestern.edu with the title as "EECS450 paper summary". For each session, we usually have two papers, one primary paper and a reference paper. You are expected to read the primary paper in depth and at least to read the abstract and introduction for the reference paper. These two papers often discuss similar/related subjects in the same topic (e.g., mobile malware). Your summary can focus on the primary paper, but ideally incorporate both papers for a broader view of this topic. Your summary should include at least:
The presentation should always include
both papers. Instead of giving two separate
presentations, we hope you can incoporate both papers and
discuss it for a broader view. For instance, both
papers may share the same background, motivation and
related work. So you only need to present them
once, and then present other issues listed below
separately and should always compare these
work. Each presentation should more or less
have the following format (as roadmap slides):
Projects (done in groups of size 2+) are a critical component of this course. Your goal is to design, build and evaluate interesting systems that address issues, solve problems and exploit techniques from classroom discussions and readings.
Projects must be written up in a term paper and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a mini-conference and write up a report. The list of potential ideas for projects will be posted soon. Feel free to use one, propose something completely different, or refine one of these into your own idea.
Project
Deliverables and Deadlines (all due at 11:59pm of the
due date)
Proposal -- Oct. 2: 3-4 pages describing the purpose of the project, work to be done and potential load distribution, expected outcome/results, etc. Make sure to describe the context and related work for the proposed project.
Weekly Meeting and Progress Report -- Oct. 10 - Nov. 25: Each team will schedule a weekly meeting (30 minutes) with the instructors. Send us the updated report and highlight the new updated part (except the May 5 week). For each week, we expect updates of 1-2 pages on the project status, initial results, and problems encountered, etc. The report is due 24 hours ahead of the meeting. Please send it to your mentor and the instructor.
Midterm presentation -- Nov. 2: Presentation of your project in progress to the class (18 minutes each group).
Project Presentation -- Nov 30: The final project presentation should have the following content: 1) briefly state the goal of the project; 2) present the algorithms and results; 3) any remaining work to be finished by the final project report; 4) work division among the group. The presentation is expected to be 30 minute each, including Q&A.
Final Report -- Dec. 7: The final report is a workshop-level paper describing your work, evaluation, related research, potential avenues to explore, etc. You should incorporate the comments received during the presentation. At the end of report, there should be an appendix of README which describes 1) where the code is; and 2) how to run the code (including the library and environment needed).