The course lectures and in-class student presentations expose you to academic research on secure and privacy-preserving systems. The final project is meant to complement this by having you learn about real-world systems (e.g., deployed by industry) that relate to concepts covered in this course.
For the final project, you must work in a group of 2-3 students. This requirement is meant to ensure that we have sufficient time for in-class presentations. A limited number of single-person projects may be allowed, subject to the instructor's approval, depending on availability of presentation time slots.
There are three deliverables for the final project:
For your final project, you may choose any system designed with security and/or privacy guarantees, as long as there is sufficient public information about the system's design, the system's security guarantees, and circumstances around its real-world deployment. A list of final project topic ideas will be posted on Piazza, but with the instructor's approval you may also choose a different system as the focus of your final project. You are encouraged to choose a system that you find particularly interesting and would like to learn more about.
No two project groups may choose the same system as the focus of their final project. A sign-up sheet will be posted on Piazza, on which each project group must sign up for a topic and a presentation time slot. The first group to sign up for a topic gets to "claim" that topic.
Once you have chosen a system for your final project, the next step is to learn about the system. Feel free to use any resources available to you (e.g., search engines, AI, books, recorded talks, etc.) to find information about it. AI can be an excellent tool for finding initial information about the system and resources to read more, but it is expected and strongly recommended that you also carefully analyze materials published by the people or organizations who designed and/or deployed the system (e.g., articles or blog posts that they wrote, talks that they gave, or marketing materials that they created).
On the provided topic list, some topics will include a link to information about the system. This is meant as a starting point for your research about the system; the expectation is that you will also do significant additional reading to learn more about it beyond the provided link.
Your group's in-class presentation should be at most 17 minutes long, including at least 5 minutes for Q&A. This mean that you should aim to speak for at most 12 minutes. In your presentation, be sure to explain the following:
Depending on the topic that you choose, some of these questions may be more interesting than others—you should answer all of the questions, but focus on the most interesting and relevant ones.
The final report should be 2-4 pages long, excluding references. You should use the USENIX template to format your report. Your report should cover all of the questions that you cover in the presentation, including additional details that you may not have had time to cover in your presentation. In particular, your report should provide greater depth in the following ways:
You are welcome to use AI to aid in your research (as described above) and to aid in drafting or editing your report. But, the expection is the report represents your own analysis and insights, and that you will participate substantially in the writing of the report even if you use AI (i.e., the report should not be entirely AI-generated). At minimum, you should edit AI-generated text for clarity and correctness and ensure that it reflects your own analysis and insights.
A small portion of the final project grade will come from responding to an end-of-quarter survey about the course that will be posted on Piazza. The survey is not anonymous, and it will be graded on completion—the content of your responses will not affect your grade. This is intended as a way for the instructor to collect feedback on the course to improve future offerings. To provide feedback anonymously, you should instead use the SET survey administered at the campus level.