CIS*6590 Course Topic Analysis Report
Xiaodong Lin
F22-W23
1 Summary and Important Dates
This course report is an individual assignment intended to inspire reflection and
interest in a particular topic relating to specific fields in cybersecurity. To that
end, this assignment requires you to attend a cybersecurity seminar - the list
of which can be found on Courselink - in a topic of interest to you, summarize
the contents of the seminar, research and review the necessary background in-
formation in the field, and then offer your analysis of the seminar along with
your opinion on the field, detailing any open questions, unexplored directions,
or unsolved problems that you believe are most significant. Please note that
the seminar topics available on Courselink will be updated frequently with new
additions as they become available throughout the course.
This does not need to be done all at once; instead, this report will be com-
pleted in three stages, each of which build on the previous one.
1. The first submission is your proposal - it details your chosen topic, plan for
researching background information, current understanding and interest
in the topic, and other relevant information that will help guide the later
writing process. This proposal is weighted much more lightly than the
next two submissions, and is mainly intended as a way for the teaching
team to review your plans and guide your plan for later submissions.
2. The second submission is the first draft of the report. This draft does
not need to be complete. It should be written after you attend your
chosen seminar, and should contain most of the background research in
your chosen topic, as well as most of your summary and analysis of the
seminar. Since this submission will likely be incomplete, it should also
contain a roadmap of work you feel still needs to be included. This could
include background research you want to incorporate, subjects you wish
to elaborate on, missing content from the seminar, or other information
you feel needs to be included in the final draft.
3. The final report is a refinement of submission two. It should build on
foundational sections in the draft, but offer a complete, edited, and refined
presentation of all the required components. Emphasis here is given to the
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depth and completeness of the background research, quality of insight into
the seminar, and scope of your analysis and opinion on the topic.
1.1 Deadlines and Grade Breakdown
The following dates are the submission deadlines for each submission:
Submission Due Date Grade Weight
Proposal Oct. 1st, 2022 10%
Rough Draft Feb. 1st, 2023 25%
Final Report Apr. 15th, 2023 65%
2 Deliverables
This section will outline the specific expectations for each submission, and what
components are required. Grading criteria will be outlined in section 3.
2.1 Proposal
The first submission, the proposal, is intended to give you a plan to follow for
the rest of the submissions, and to ensure the teaching team has an opportunity
to guide your efforts. This section must include:
1. Your choice of topic from the professional seminars in cybersecurity.
2. Your plan for how to research and present the background information
required to understand your chosen topic.
3. your prior understanding and opinion of your chosen topic before you
begin your analysis.
Each of these are detailed further below. This submission has no minimum
length or specific format. However, 2-3 pages will likely be sufficient to express
what is required. Format can be anything effective in organizing your thoughts
and reflections - usually a single-column document with section headers works
fine.
2.1.1 Choice of Topic
This is the simplest of the requirements. You must provide the topic you intend
to attend a seminar for and indicate which seminar(s) from the course list you
plan to attend.
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Topics The following are the available topics:
1. Bring Your Own Internet to Cybersecurity Research and Education (Cy-
bersecurity education),
2. Mobile and IoT Security,
3. How I Hack Fortune 500s (Hacking),
4. Cybersecurity Breach Management,
5. Cybersecurity Tech Trends & Careers,
6. Blockchain Security,
7. Privacy in Big Data Processing,
8. security operations center (SOC).
Please note that these topics will likely be updated and more will be available
even at the time of this assignment’s release. These will be constantly expanding
to encompass more subjects as they become available.
2.1.2 Research Plan
The research plan is intended to provide a roadmap of subtopics, background
information, and context that you plan to present in your analysis. Included
here could be a list of related topics, sources or particular papers that you
intend to reference to provide a background, and subjects in the topic that you
are unfamiliar with. This especially allows the teaching team opportunity to
provide additional sources, subjects, and avenues of research that you may not
have considered when initially investigating the topic.
2.1.3 Initial Impression
The initial impression section is intended to provide a baseline for what you
know and what your view of the topic is before you conduct a deep analysis
of the work in that topic. This can include a list of unfamiliar terms, topics,
or subjects, known problems in the field you are aware of, and opinions on the
state of the topic. Your opinions on the topic do not need to be concrete - they
can be doubts of the importance of the topic, or else details of your interest in
the topic and why you chose it.
2.2 Rough Draft
The rough draft is the first real version of your final report, but it does not need
to be complete. The first draft should at minimum contain the first version of
the background research and summary of the seminar. Anything else that is
complete is only to your benefit, but incomplete sections should be explained in
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a roadmap, detailing what is left to be completed or fleshed out. The purpose of
the rough draft is to allow the teaching team to get a detailed understanding of
how your report and analysis are coming along, as well as to provide guidance
on the direction as compared to the initial proposal. Here, no format is required
as in the proposal. There is also no length requirement, as each student will
likely have different amounts of content at this stage depending on their topic.
Single column format is effective here as well, but not required.
2.2.1 Background Research
This section should contain context, explanations, descriptions and definitions,
and discuss concepts or research relevant to the seminar. The purpose is sim-
ilar to that of a literature review, wherein you collect all the relevant current
and historically important research into a comparative summary between the
different work that has been done.
Since different topics differ in age, theoretical grounding, and other details,
there is no firm number of sources that need to be referenced. Instead, the
emphasis is on the depth and breadth of knowledge required to gain an un-
derstanding in the particular field. If the field is very specific and theoretical,
a relatively small number of academic papers may be sufficient to provide the
background needed. In contrast, a very general topic may require many, more
general sources, and likely won’t require the same level of depth for specific
details.
Regardless, this section should contain sufficient background information
that another student unfamiliar with the topic could read through and under-
stand the concepts discussed in your opinions and analysis.
2.2.2 Summary of Seminar
Similar to the background research, this section should contain a summary of the
professional seminar, including the topic, specific details or concepts introduced
in the seminar, and the novelty or “main point”. This section does not need
to be a verbatim recreation of the seminar itself, but should contain sufficient
information that a reader who was not there could understand what was being
discussed, and what the focus of the seminar was.
This section is supported by the background research section, and terms not
explicitly introduced in the seminar section should definitely be covered in the
background research section, so as to fully cover the topics under discussion.
2.2.3 Roadmap
The roadmap should contain a detailed list of all the outstanding content yet
to be written. This does not need to be overly complex, but should contain a
list of topics you intend to address in your final report:
1. Topics you need to explore further to finish your analysis or opinion
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2. Open questions you believe need to be addressed
3. Missing subjects in your background research (if any)
The roadmap is intended to keep the final submission on track as you develop
your report. It should also contain a rough idea for your analysis and opinion,
including state-of-the-art topics you wish to compare in your analysis and topics
you wish to express your opinion on.
2.3 Final Report
The final report is the polished, complete version of your rough draft. It should
contain a completed background research, seminar summary, analysis of the
field, and your opinion. Unlike the previous two submissions, this section of the
project has a required format and length. IEEE two-column format is required,
and the length should be 8 pages minimum, with less than 12 pages being
recommended. These lengths exclude the bibliography. Along with the Analysis
and Opinion sections, this submission should also begin with an abstract and
introduction, mainly meant to give non-experts a quick intro to cybersecurity
and your topic you will outline. The IEEE template is available widely online,
such as from:
www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html
www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/ieee-conference-template/grfzhhncsfqn
2.3.1 Analysis
This section should outline what subjects in the topic you wish to analyze
specifically, and should describe how you intend to build an analysis of the
state of the topic. As an example, an analysis of the field of cryptography could
include a comparison of modern encryption algorithms and what drawbacks they
could possess as quantum computers become more commonplace. Depending
on your topic, you may wish to analyze its importance or future relevance in
comparison to other fields, or else to examine what other topics can benefit from
advancements in this field. Emphasis here is given to the depth of state-of-the-
art topics analyzed here, as well as the connections that can be made between
other fields.
2.3.2 Opinion
While your analysis provides an objective view of the state of the field, your
opinion is the subject side of your insight into the topic. Your opinion can con-
tain what subtopics you think are most important, or what research directions
you believe should receive more attention. While your opinion cannot be wrong,
it does require justification. This can come from the benefits and drawbacks of
specific techniques, practices, or technologies, or from direction comparisons in
literature.
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3 Grading Criteria
The grading criteria for each section is outlined here. While these do not include
exact metrics for grade calculations, this section will give guidance on what is
expected for each section.
3.1 Proposal
The proposal is the least weighted component; this is because at the initial
stage, there will likely be very little decided that will not change other than
your chosen topic.
The proposal will be graded based on the depth of planning in your initial
plan, especially the research plan. The research plan should include topics,
sources, and places you will search for further information.
In the initial impression section, emphasis in marking is given to the range of
topics your opinion covers, but not to your preexisting knowledge in the topic.
3.2 Rough Draft
The rough draft should have the background research component reasonably
complete. Emphasis here is given to the depth of research at this point, as in to
say, how much was completed now compared to how much was left to the last
submission.
The summary of the seminar should also be nearly complete at this point. In
particular, the completeness of the topics discussed in the seminar and amount
of further work left for the last section will be taken into account. The quality
of the summary is also evaluated, including writing style and originality of the
summary (as compared to a word-for-word recreation).
The roadmap will be marked based on how completely it encompasses the
topics yet to be discussed. As an example in cryptography, “comparison between
modern one-way hashing function” is less specific than “comparison between
Blowfish, Keccak256, and SHA3-256”. While the roadmap does not need to
have all the details sorted out, it should be as specific as possible in what needs
to be done.
3.3 Final Report
The final report combines grading criteria from the rough draft with marks for
the quality of the final report. The final report should be free of grammar and
spelling errors, should be well-written, and should contain sufficient detailed
justification to support your analysis and opinion sections. In particular, the
depth of your background research, quality of the seminar summary, and de-
tailed support of your arguments in the analysis and opinion sections are highly
valued.
