Guidelines for Writing Reports on Problems and Solutions

Earning marks for finding and using published sources

Repeating at length the contents of the lectures or recommended readings (or my own words) earns no marks. Instead, finding useful material in published sources, either recommended by me or not, and using it well (explaining its applicability or the limits to its applicability, or why its answers are wrong) does earn marks; of course, justifying your statements by reference to lecture material is fine.

Make sure to be clear in your explanations of what you propose and why it is right. Marking is based on correctness of your answers and arguments, which includes clarity: if a statement that you make can be interpreted in two ways, and only one of the two is correct, you gain fewer marks than if it had only one possible meaning that is correct.

As a general guideline about how I mark: I will give 40% of the mark if the report convinces me that you understand the problem and which parts of the knowledge from the module applies to it, even if your analysisand/or proposed solutions are very deficient; 50% also requires a basic answer/solution, even if not very complete; 70% for a report that shows you have read around sufficiently and done what practical work was necessary, and your solution/answer is fully convincing, with a good explanation and argument supporting it; extra marks for reports that show especially effective efforts inventing clever solutions or proofs of their validity, and/or in finding pertinent literature, and/or good critique ofyour sources, and/or proposals of how your solution/answer could be validated in practice (for instancein a company that wished to apply it); these extra marks also require, of course, clarity of explanations.

Since you have limited time, it is accepted that your solutions will not be perfect and you won’t have absolute confidence in them: you should briefly explain the limits to the confidence one can have in your answer.

In many cases, solutions for human-related problems, even if well thought out, cannot be trusted to be effective unless validated by observing and measuring their effects in practice, either in the intended environment of use or in some experiment. If this is true for your proposed solutions, you earn marks for showing awareness of it and more marks for proposing practical ways of performing this validation: what could be measured, what experiment could be organised if necessary (you are not expected to actually carry out such a validation exercise).

A critical attitude is essential: when you propose a solution for a problem, you will receive marks for also identifying what downsides it has and how one could decide on the appropriate trade-offs; or for discussing/comparing alternative solutions. Even if, in an extreme case, you concluded that a risk that you are examining cannot be alleviated in any way, this can get full marks if your reasoning is sound and thorough.

Make sure to indicate by bibliographic references what sources you have used. You can use any standard style of referencing that you find in conventional research publications. Make sure that the references section contains enough information for a reader to find each source cited, and that there are appropriate pointers in the body of your text.

If you are calling on the authority of a source to justify a statement you make, feel free to quote the appropriate text verbatim, of course between quotes, so as not to plagiarise. (Such citations, however, count towards your total word count as though they were your own words). Always reference your sources, even if not quoting them verbatim.

For any security problem, first identify what can go wrong and its potential consequences; if you can also suggest the likelihood of the various undesired events, or how one could find out about it, this will gain marks.

• Abstract (200 words, which don’t count towards the total word count)
• Introduction: what problem you are addressing, and how. Don't spend space explaining why the problem is important.
• One or more sections as body, to cover which important facts you found, and your arguments for answering the initial question or solving the problem proposed.
• A short conclusion that includes a summary of your proposed solution/answer and what factors limit the confidence one can have in it.

Problems with encryption software. Re-read the classic paper "why Johnny can't encrypt"; try to start using encryption for your Email, choosing a specific encryption tool. Identify the forms of cybercrime that encryptions i meant to defend against. Comment on what are now the difficulties that may stand in the way of using encryption (cause users to give up, or to use encryption the wrong way, systematically or through occasional slips, lapses or mistakes), or generally cause their attempts at using it to be ineffective. To get first-hand evidence, use some up-to-date encryption software that you can obtain and use, and current recommendations about how to adopt encryption (for instance, Hilarie Orman, "Why Won't Johnny Encrypt?,"