Final Project
Project Description
Over the course of the quarter, students will conduct a small research project in the area of
privacy-preserving systems.
Students will work in groups of 1-3.
As part of the project, students will complete a project proposal, progress report, final
report, and presentation.
Over the course of the project, students should:
- Identify a problem in the area of privacy-preserving systems.
- Conduct a literature review of the area.
- Design a system to address the problem.
- Specify the security properties of the system.
- Implement the system and evaluate its performance.
If you are taking another class with a project component, you can work on a problem in
the same project space for this project, but there should be distinct contributions for this class,
and students should clearly describe which contributions are specific to this class
(they should also check with the instructor for the other class).
Students may also work on a problem that is a part of an ongoing research project with
collaborators who are not taking the class: students should also clearly specify their
contributions during the class.
In both cases, students should make this clear in their project proposal.
Project Milestones
- Project proposal (due 10/16)
The project proposal should be 1-2 paragraphs and include: the group members, the problem that
you're trying to solve, and the privacy goals for your system.
After students submit the proposal, course staff will set up a time to meet and provide
feedback.
- Project progress report (due 11/11)
The progress report should be 1-2 pages and include: any changes to your initial problem
statement and/or privacy goals, a related work survey,
a summary of progress so far (along with any challenges you have encountered), and
the remaining goals you have for the project.
- Project final report (due 12/2)
The final report should be 5-6 pages and include: a clear problem statement with motivation
for studying the problem, a related work survey, the security and privacy properties of
the system (along with a discussion of how the system satisfies these properties),
the system design, and an evaluation showing how the system performs. The report should also
include a link to a public GitHub repository containing the code for your system.
- Project presentations (12/2, 12/4)
All project proposals and reports should be formatted using the
USENIX LaTeX template
and submitted on Gradescope.
Choosing a project idea
As a starting point, students can look at the papers from class, or papers from conferences
(e.g., IEEE Security and Privacy, USENIX Security, OSDI, and SOSP) and then ask the
following questions:
- Is it possible to build a system that provides stronger (or different) privacy guarantees?
- Or better performance?
- Or extend some of the techniques to support new functionality?
- Are there ways to extend the ideas to new application domains?
While these are starting points, students should not feel constrained by these questions or
existing papers.
Students can also talk to the instructor at office hours about potential project ideas.