As gradute students, you must not only learn technical content, you must also learn how to do research! This involves 1) reading prior research to learn research techniques and understand the boundary between what is know and unknown, 2) synthesizing prior findings to develop ideas for impactful new research directions, and 3) ultimately communicating these ideas to the research community.
To practice these skills, you will choose a research topic in network security and read three instructor-approved papers to gain a deeper understanding. You will then prepare a 15-20 minute presentation that describes the broader research area, synthesize the three papers, and ultimately derive new insights, such as new research ideas, conceptual frameworks, or contradictory results.
Look at the recent proceedings of the top security conferences-IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P), USENIX Security, ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS), or Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS)-and look for papers related to network security (i.e., any other topics covered in this class!). Then find two closely related works, which would typically be included in the related works or background sections.
You must email the instructor by November 15, 2026 to notify them of your research topic (short paragraph) + three papers.
Some details and advice for preparing the presentation: