CSCE 522 – Information Security Principles
Fall 2002
Project Information
Project requirements:
1. Form research groups of 2-4 students
Organize a research group of 2-4 students with similar interest. Establish strengths of group members
and how their strength may compliment the other’s.
Deliverables: List of group members, their expertise, and how they compliment each other’s skills.
Due date: Sept 22, 2003
2. Select topic of interest
You search current research topics, what are the main security issues that the scientific community is
involved in. Based on the dynamic aspect of the general topic, you need to use resources available on
web, journal, and conference publications. Journal publications are in general the highest quality ones,
on the other hand, they have a long turn around time, thus may miss out on some very recent
achievements. ACM, IEEE conferences are good quality ones, too. At this phase you read a lot, but in
high level.
Deliverables: Short description of one or two topic of interest.
Due date: Oct. 6, 2003
3. Identify initial research papers, define the research problem, and expected contributions of the research
After selecting a general area of interest, you need to settle on a particular problem, e.g., after selecting
the area of security of web-based collaboration, you chose to study access control requirements for a
particular application.
Deliverables: Choose a particular problem within one of the topic of interest, explain the problem in a
greater context and show its importance. Lists of initial publications (3-4 papers) and limitations of
current solutions.
Due date: Oct. 6, 2003
4. Perform detailed research of the chosen topic – Build background information
Gather additional publications on the chosen topic. In general, you’ll read around 5-10 papers,
depending on the technical difficulties of the papers. At the end of this phase you have a clear
understanding of the current state of research on the chosen topic and related issues.
Deliverables: List of extended reference publications, their analysis, and relation to the problem of
your chosen problem. For each publication, list: title, name of authors, where was it published, what
the paper is about (1-2 paragraph), what are the paper’s contributions, what proof the paper gives to
support the claimed contributions, how important the solved problem is, what are the limitations of the
solution, how can we do better…
Due date: October 20, 2003
5. Develop solutions for research problem
This is the phase where you use your resources to develop solution for the research problem. It may be
implementation oriented work based on existing publications, an implementation to solve a particular
problem within a domain, or purely theoretical research. For any of these, you need to:
REPEAT UNTIL SOLUTION=DEVELOPED OR DEADLINE= REACHED
a. Revise research problem and expected contributions
After acquiring extended information in the field of interest, revisit the research problem
description developed in 2. Use your knowledge to refine (focus) the research problem and
give a better estimate of the expected results. In general, implementation oriented works
may be based on applying existing technologies for a particular domain. Theoretical
research requires that you show that it is different (and usually better) than the existing
solutions.
Deliverables: Revised problem formulation and expected results.
Due date: (Draft) Nov 17, 2003
b. Show problem in extended context
Describe the problem from a high level view. This will put the reader into the context,
allows to establish the importance of the work.
Deliverables: Placement of your work in greater context.
Due date: (Draft) Nov 17, 2003
c. Give a representative example of problem
Give a simple, easy to follow example of the targeted problem. This should be
understandable for any reader without additional knowledge of the particular domain.
Deliverables: Write up of an example.
Due date: (Draft) Nov 17, 2003
d. Define related concepts
