CSEP564 Homework 1

This assignment is focused on helping you to cultivate the security mindset, and on helping encourage you to think about computer security in your outside-of-course activities.

Requirements.

How to submit. Submit a single PDF to Catalyst (link on the main page). Include your name and UWNetID on each page of that PDF.

Due. Oct 23, 11:45pm.

Collaboration. You may discuss your current events and security reviews with others before you write your current events and security reviews.

However, if you discuss your current events and security reviews with others before you write your current events and security reviews, then you must (1) leave a thirty-minute gap between those discussions and when you start to write your reviews and (2) you must write your current events and security reviews entirely by yourselves.

You may also discuss your current events and security reviews with others after all parties involved in the discussions have completed their current events and security reviews.

Summary: you may discuss your current events and security reviews with others, but your writeups need to be entirely on your own.

Current Event Reflection

The goal of this part of the assignment is to help encourage you to think about computer security when doing some of your daily activities, namely, reading the news. While you could just pick the first news article you see and write a quick response to the questions below, to get the most out of this assignment we encourage you to go about your daily activities for a week or so, assuming you normally read blogs and news stories regularly. As you read each blog post or news story, ask yourself "is there something interesting here from a computer security perspective?" After a week or so, pick one of the stories that interested you the most and complete this part of the assignment. (If you don't read news articles regularly, then you will need to read some for this assignment.)

Your current event reflection should include all of the following:

Please try to be concise. Your current event summary shouldn't be very long -- at most one or two typed pages. We find grading much easier if you use bulleted lists or bolded section headings to help us tease apart the different parts of your answers.

There are some examples of past current event articles here. (You might have to scroll down a bit; the specific format used back then was a little different.)

Security Review

Your goal with the security review is to evaluate the potential security and privacy issues with a new technology, evaluate the severity of those issues, and discuss how the technology might address those security and privacy issues. You will do this at the conceptual level, hence the emphasis on "potential" above.

Your security review should contain:

There are some examples of past security reviews here. (The requirements for these past security reviews may, however, be different than the requirements for this version of the course.)

Please try to be clear and concise -- ideally around two or three typed pages. And as with the current events, we find grading much easier if you use bulleted lists or bolded section headings to help us tease apart the different parts of your answers.