Schedule and Readings
Tentative Topics
Week 1
Mon, Jan 8 – Introduction
[Lecture]
Week 2
Mon, Jan 15 – No Class
(MLK Day)
Week 3
Mon, Jan 22 – Botnets
[Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Week 4
Mon, Jan 29 – SSL
[Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Week 5
Mon, Feb 5 – Censorship
[Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Week 6
Mon, Feb 12 – Tracking, Profiling, Ads
[Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Week 7
Mon, Feb 19 – No Class
(Presidents' Day)
Wed, Feb 21 – Midterm
(Mandatory)
Week 8
Mon, Feb 26 – DNS Attacks
[Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Week 9
Mon, Mar 4 – Cybercrime/Underground Economy [Presentations]
- TBD
- TBD
Wed, Mar 6 – BGP Attacks
[Presentations]
- TBD
Week 10
Mon, Mar 11 – Project Presentations
- TBD
- TBD
Wed, Mar 13 – Project Presentations
- TBD
NB: Most papers should be publicly accessible. If any links are broken, please search for them. If any of them require paid subscription, you can access them for free when connecting on campus. For off-campus access, try UCR VPN.
Paper Presentation Guidelines
Prepare a #TBD minutes presentation of the paper. Focus on the following:
- State the problem that they try to solve, why, and how, and the paper's main contributions.
- High-level discussion points: What are things that you like and dislike about the paper? Why is this a good or bad paper (yes it is completely okay to say it is bad as long as you provide evidence to support your claim. We strongly encourage you to be critical!)? What assumptions (explicit and implicit) are made and are they valid? How do you think the authors come up with the idea (is there a single key observation that led to the whole paper)? How you might do it differently? Any other suggestions to improve the paper? What principles can you extract from the paper? From the insights described in the paper, how you might apply it to solve other problems?
- Low-level discussion points: frame them as questions for the rest of the class to respond to. Really, the discussion points should be designed to engage students in critical and creative thinking.
- * For attack/vulnerability analysis papers: Why does an identified
vulnerability exist (any implicit assumptions)? Can you imagine or come up
with other attack scenarios exploiting the same underlying vulnerability?
How do you think the authors discover the vulnerability (what prompted them)?
Why were the networks/protocols designed this way (any alternatives)?
* For defense papers: Why is a defense successful (what are some metrics to quantify the success)? Any serious limitations? Do you think the defense will be deployed in practice? What are the hurdles that may prevent it from being deployed? What assumptions or necessary conditions (in the attack being addressed by the paper) are broken by the defense?
* For measurement papers: What are the key observations? How are the data collected (are they representative / biased)? Can you replicate the measurement? Are the conclusions convincing? Any alternative explanations of the results?