Design Projects

Design Project Report

Reports for design projects should contain the following sections. All sections are required for the final report. For the pre-final draft of the report, all points and questions shown in bold and italic font are required.

In addition to the instructions on this page, make sure to follow general instructions for all term project reports.

Pre-final Draft of the Report

For the pre-final draft of the report all points and questions shown in bold and italic font are required.

Grammar and Language Clarity

The final project report is supposed to be free from grammatical and other language-related errors and issues. Points will be taken off for lack of clarity, incorrect grammar, or spelling (see the bottom of the general instructions for details).

Abstract (3%)

The abstract should summarize the problem addressed, methodology, results, conclusions, and contributions.

I. Introduction (10%)

The section should provide the following (one paragraph per each bullet item).

  1. Explain clearly the problem addressed by your project.
  2. Explain why this is an important problem.
  3. Summarize the designed system
  4. Summarize related work.
  5. Summarize the methodology that you have followed for evaluating your design.
  6. Summarize evaluation results you obtained .
  7. Summarize the conclusions your drew from the results.
  8. List contributions of your project. Explain what this project has contributed to the society in general and the cybersecurity community in particular.

II. Related Work (5%)

This section should explain what others, particularly as reported in academic literature, have done designing systems similar to the one designed by your team.

Make sure to compare and contrast your work with the related work.

III. Adversary Model (9%)

Describe the adversary model that your design is intended to resist. Adversary attributes should be clearly described, as explained in the course study material: Section 1.4 of “Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels”.

IV. System Design (20%)

    1. This section should explain the most interesting parts of your design. The system design should be explained in enough detail to understand what happens when various types of users interact with the system, what the data flow is, and how the proposed design is different from the designs of existing systems.
    2. Provide rationale for the design decisions.
    3. Explain which principles of designing secure systems have been employed by your design.

Use diagrams to illustrate data flow and/or interactions among the components of the proposed design.

V. System Prototype (15%)

    1. Explain the details of the prototype of your approach. This is the prototype that is used for evaluating your approach.

VI. Evaluation

This section should provide details of the evaluation, using the following sub-subsections.

  1. (A. Evaluation Methodology) (12%) This subsection should explain how the system was evaluated. Focus on the most important for the reader elements of your evaluation.
  2. (B. Results of the evaluation) (7%) This section should describe the results of the evaluation. Remember to keep the description of the evaluation and the description of the results in separate sub-sections.
  3. (C. Discussion of the evaluation results) (7%) This section should discuss what the results of the evaluation mean.

The above enumerated items should be discussed in separate subsections of Methodology section. Their titles are suggested in the parenthesis.

VII. Discussion (10%)

Discuss pros and cons of your design, as well as limitations and advantages of it. This discussion should integrate the related work, the motivation for the design, the adversary model, the ideas of the design, and the results of the evaluation. This section should be about one page.

VIII. Conclusion (2%)

This section should summarize the report in 1-2 paragraphs. Although a conclusion may review the main points of the report, do not replicate the abstract as the conclusion. A conclusion might elaborate on the importance of the work or suggest applications and extensions.

References

Place references here. Make sure they are complete (e.g., page numbers, conference and journal titles, author names). Aim to use more academic references than non-academic ones.