Description

The seminar addresses current research on information security and cryptography, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective.

Registration

The official registration for the seminar will occur at the organizational meeting taking place Wednesday, April 29.

Prerequisites

There are no formal requirements for participation. Students should be familiar with basic topics in computer security and cryptography.

Participation in the organization meeting and all the presentation sessions is mandatory.

Requirements for obtaining credit points (Scheinvergabe)

The seminar requires both an individual contribution by every participant and a contribution achieved within a team of four people (formed by the speakers of each session).

As far as the individual part is concerned, each participant

• is assigned a research paper that she/he has to present in the class. In order to avoid misunderstandings regarding the presentation of the assigned paper and to have possible questions answered, each participant must have a first version of her/his slides and arrange a meeting with her/his adviser at least two weeks prior to her/his talk;
• has to read and understand the papers assigned to the other members of her/his team. Team members will always be assigned papers of similar topic in order to deepen their understanding in the respective area.

The group part requires the team

• to come up with novel research ideas in the respective topic on which the team has been assigned papers. These ideas do not have to constitute outstanding research achievements, but they should be novel in the sense that they complement some of the existing works in some nice fashion;
• to present these novel ideas after the individual talks in the session. The ideas will then be discussed in the class, with a couple of ideas being collaboratively chosen as the ones that look the most promising and that could be pursued further by the team;
• to work out the details of the selected idea and obtain some results by the end of the term;
• to document the results in a scientific form, using appropriate math and illustrating examples where necessary. As a guideline, the overall extent of the report should be about 15-20 pages when typeset with LaTeX in 11pt font. (For reference the reports from last semesters are available here and here.)

You must submit (1) your team report as one LaTeX source and in PDF format, as well as (2) the final version of your slides, before the end of term. All team reports and presentation slides will be made available on this Web site.

Presentation Sessions

All presentation sessions will be held during two consecutive days near the end of the lecture time, but before the exam period.

Each presentation has been allocated 30 minutes. The length of each talk should be 25 minutes, while the remaining 5 minutes will be used for questions and comments. We would like this to be a seminar that participants can profit from, so the main emphasis of the talks must be on being understandable.

Additionally, after the talks of each session the team has allocated 15 minutes to present a list of potentially interesting, scientifically novel ideas, for discussing them in the class, and for identifying the most promising ideas on which the team could work on further.