Goal

The goal of this assignment is to become familiar with Bruce Schneier’s security writings and to see what some of the present-day security concerns are compared to the concerns of a decade ago that were covered in HW1.

What to do

1. Read Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter for August 15, 2020, 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 security-related topic from this list and read the full referenced article.
3. Write a brief paper (200-400 words) that indicates your chosen topic and summarizes what you found to be most interesting or surprising about the article. Relate it to the security topics of HW1 where appropriate, or say why this might be a newer kind of concern.

Style guidelines

These guidelines should have appeared in Assignment 1 but are still applicable.

1. The top of your paper should have a header giving your name, date, course number and 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.