GTISC Security Reading Group

Fall 2007

Georgia Tech

Note: The SRG website has been moved to a new place http://research.gtisc.gatech.edu/srg/. (since March 2008)

Overview

• Location:    Klaus 3402
• Time:        1-3pm Every Friday
• Website:     http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~guofei/srg/
• Swiki:       http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/srg/
• Maillist:    https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/security-reading-group (Lab member only or by reference)

The GTISC Security Reading Group is a weekly informal seminar for discussing research papers, emerging problems, interesting issues in computer and network security (our main purpose). We need criticize, discuss/brainstorm, in purpose of producing new idea. This is also a stage for individual presentations of current research efforts, trying to get response/comment/criticism.

Currently, it starts as an informal discussion forum and lunch meeting for (and only for) GTISC lab students. This seminar is supervised by professors Wenke Lee, maintained by Guofei Gu. We greatfuly thank Prof. Lee for his generous support for the lunch.

Drop me a line if you have any comments (guofei AT cc.gatech.edu)!

Requirement of Engagement

• Everybody is required to read the paper before the seminar, otherwise you will not benefit from the discussion/brainstorming. We are a reading group, and the focus is on the "discussion", not the presentation. The presentation should take less time.
• We pick one person we call the moderator for every seminar. The moderator is responsible for:
  • Writing a short "draft" summary and slides of the paper before the seminar. The summary should at least include:
    • Problem domain: background, motivation, why this problem is important/novel/interesting
    • Idea of the paper: assumption, main technique, result
    • Comparison with related work (Related work should be in detail in this topic/area, so that later we can use this if writing a relevant paper)
    • Possible future work/direction
    • Pros, cons of the paper (your conclusion)
    • What can we do based on this work: lesson learned from this work? stimulate new related problem? flawed assumption/technique can be improved/extended? technique can be used to other (maybe your own dedicated) domain to solve other problem? what extention can we do for further work? ...
  • Reading/Presenting the draft summary during the first 20 minutes of the seminar,
  • Preparing a list of 10-15 discussion questions, usually questioning the assumptions and critically evaluating the paper,
  • Steering the discussion,
  • Incorporating user comments into the draft summary, and
  • Sending the final summary to Guofei at most within a week of the seminar.
• We also have two people, each prepares a list of pros and cons about the paper and presents it after the summary is read out by the moderator. Everybody moderates at least once and does a few pros or cons.
• Everyone should give a final review score on the paper at the end of discussion, roughly, strong accept, weak accept, weak reject or strong reject (as if you are the reviewer). The reviews will be collected by moderator and written into final summary.
• Papers are selected based on members' suggestions and discussion.
  • The aim is to try to select recent security papers from quality conferences or journals (mainly Oakland, CCS, USENIX, NDSS, RAID, ESORICS, CSFW, ACSAC, SIGCOMM, SOSP, OSDI, Crypto, EuroCrypto, etc, there are some links on my personal website).
  • Make sure you check the list of papers that were already presented before you pick your paper.
  • The paper for discussion with all relevant info (including the URL and a justification for choosing the paper) should be posted no later than 7 days before the seminar.

Schedule

Paper reading list  http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/srg/

Previous years. A candidate paper list (for 2005)

Related Links (see my webpage for more)

• Other Security Reading Groups: UIUC SRG , Wisc SRG , Dartmouth SRG , CMU SRG , CERIAS SRG, Purdue DS2 , Berkley SRG , UVA SRG , NYU CRG
• Computer Security Conference Ranking and Statistic