Goal

The goal of this problem set is to increase your understanding and awareness of the complexity of current cybersecurity threats. No longer limited to script-kiddies or credit card thieves, cyberattacks are launched for many purposes beyond pure financial gain.

What to do

1. Read Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter for January 15, 2019, where you will find brief summaries of 21 essays and news items. Most of them describe one or another aspect of information security such as new kinds of attacks and new approaches to strengthing security.
2. Pick an interesting topic from this list. Explore it in greater depth by reading some of the cited background articles from which the brief summary was derived.
3. Write a brief paper (1-2 pages) summarizing what you found to be most interesting or surprising about the article. Depending on the chosen article, you should relate the described attack, security threat, or defenses to the security principles discussed in the Lecture 2 notes.

Style guidelines

1. The top of your paper should have a header giving your name, date, course name, and assignment number.
2. The paper should have 1.25” margins, use a 12-point serif font such as Times Roman, and specify single or 1.5 line spacing.
3. If you know LaTeX, please use it. It produces much more professional-looking papers. If you don’t know it, this might be a good time to learn.

How to submit

Prepare your paper as a PDF file, following the submission guidelines at the end of Homework Assignment 1. Please submit your PDF file electronically as before, using the Canvas Assignments tool. Please feel free to ask me for help with any issues concerning the paper’s content or submission.