Towards an Insightful Computer Security Seminar

TL;DR

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of a graduate seminar in computer security that emphasizes critical thinking, literature review, and understanding current research trends through conference paper analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a seminar format that combines reviewing recent conference papers with fostering critical thinking and engagement among graduate students in computer security.

Findings

Students preferred topics like Privacy, Web Security, and Authentication.

One-third of students chose sessions based on paper titles.

Encouraging environment boosts student engagement and discussion.

Abstract

In this paper we describe our experience in designing and evaluating our graduate level computer security seminar course. In particular, our seminar is designed with two goals in mind. First, to instil critical thinking by teaching graduate students how to read, review and present scientific literature. Second, to learn about the state-of-the-art in computer security and privacy research by reviewing proceedings from one of the top four security and privacy conferences including IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland SP), USENIX Security, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) and ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). The course entails each student to i) choose a specific technical session from the most recent conference, ii) review and present three papers from the chosen session and iii) analyze the relationship between the chosen papers from the session. To evaluate the course, we designed a set of questions to understand the motivation and decisions behind the students' choices as well as to evaluate and improve the quality of the course. Our key insights from the evaluation are the following: The three most popular topics of interest were Privacy, Web Security and Authentication, ii) 33% of the students chose the sessions based on the title of papers and iii) when providing an encouraging environment, students enjoy and engage in discussions.