Homework 1 - Project Topic Selection

Assignment

The actual assignment is to write a couple of paragraphs about your selected topic. The paragraphs should cover what topic you have selected and give a rough outline of what you plan to do (i.e. if you are doing research, you should give a timeline for the research or if you're planning to do a survey paper, you should state that intent).

Email me your write-up in text, OpenOffice or PDF formats only.

Topic Ideas

• Cryptography
  • Look into the weaknesses in the encryption methods used for 802.11 WEP and WPA1 (TKIP mode).
  • Cryptanalysis of an encryption or message digest algorithm (survey of others' cryptanalysis or your own investigation)
  • Develop your own encryption or message digest algorithm (hard)
  • Public key infrastructure - current proposals, research into new methods
  • Authentication protocols - survey of protocols using cryptographic methods or propose your own
  • Digital signatures - analysis of security, survey of methods, etc
  • Use of message digests for integrity protection
  • Investigate issues in digital watermarking techniques that use cryptographic algorithms.
• Vulnerability Analysis
  • Pick a class of vulnerabilities and analyze them. Try to apply the vulnerability analysis models to them.
  • Survey papers on vulnerability analysis that have been published since Aslam's paper.
• Malicious Logic
  • Choose several recent "in the wild" attacks and analyze them (or survey others' published reports)
  • Research predicted trends in malicious logic techniques
  • Survey the most commonly targetted systems
• Trusted Systems
  • Survey seminal papers on the concept of assurance in computing
  • Survey or develop assurance techniques for a specific application such as spacecraft
  • Look into current system evaluation policies
  • Look into current research in formal verification
• Confidentiality and Integrity Policies
  • Present a survey of policies not covered in class (Bell-LaPadula, Biba and Clarke-Wilson will be covered in class)
  • Analyze a specific application such as a medical clinic and describe what policies would best suit their confidentiality/integrity needs
  • Survey languages for expressing confidentiality and/or integrity policies
  • Look in to papers that detail the shortcomings in the policies covered in class.
• Intrusion Detection/Prevention/Response
  • Differences between signature and anomaly based detection
  • Current research trends in intrusion prevention and response
  • Detection of variants or novel attacks
  • Artificial immune systems as a way of intrusion detection
• Network Protocols
  • Survey methods for detecting phishing, spam and other unsolicited e-mail
  • Survey proposed standards to add encryption to previously plain text protocols
  • Chose your favorite protocol and describe how it could be improved from a security standpoint
• Ethics, Legal Issues, Policy
  • Survey current thoughts on responsible vulnerability disclosure
  • See what the current state of risk analysis and cost vs benefit analysis is in academia and industry
  • Survey current attitudes and/or legal issues surrounding DRM