Formal Methods for Finding and Fixing Information Leaks

Dear students,

the final grades for the seminar should now be visible to you in CMS. These are the combined grades from your presentation, participation, and final report.

For those of you that did not already receive feedback on the first version of the report, I have also added (brief) feedback on your report (see the submission page).

Cheers, and good luck in the new semester!

Dear students,

I have just uploaded the feedback for everybody who has already submitted a first version of the report. In addition, I want to give a few hints that apply to multiple reports, and could also be useful to those that have not submitted a first version yet:

- the summaries should be readable for someone who has not participated in the seminar (and who has only a general computer science and security background, but is not specialized in the area of the seminar), and they should give them a good idea of the topics and papers we have covered, and possibly your own conclusions about the papers
- a challenge of technical writing is to be as precise as possible - for example, while in prose or lyrical writing it is good to have a variety of phrases for the same thing, in technical writing you usually want to stick to one phrase to make clear that you are still talking about exactly the same thing, and not something different. Alternatively, you can explicitly state that two phrases mean the same thing, e.g. write something like "we distinguish between secret (or high-security) and public (or low-security) data".
- the report becomes more readable if every summary is based on what has already been written in previous summaries. E.g., constant-time programming is one of the central topics of R3, and therefore should be explained in the summary of R3; when summarizing the other papers that also consider this topic (P7, P9), it does not have to be explained again - instead a short reminder and a reference to (the summary of) R3 is enough.

Dear Students,

I have just uploaded the scoring schemes for the presentations and the final reports, which should give you a good idea of what we expect for each of them.

If you want feedback on your slides before your presentation, feel free to send us you draft, and/or ask Joachim for a meeting.

Stay safe, see you in the new year!

Forgot to mention this before:

for reading group paper R2, in the Materials section there is a comment "Sections 7,8,9 will not be discussed in detail.", i.e., you can ignore these sections when reading and summarizing the paper, and similarly for R4.

Similar instructions will be added for some of the presentation papers, if they are significantly more complex than others.

As discussed in our first meeting, the regular meeting time will be moved to

*Thursdays, 18:00*

We will have
- meetings on Nov 18 and Nov 25 for the reading group papers,
- no meetings in December (to give you time to prepare your presentations), and
- weekly meetings starting on Jan 6, 2022 with two paper presentations each.

In the next meeting, we will have informal presentations of
R1 by Hadar Muchtar, and
R2 by Paul Eichler and Trupti Koushik.

Dear students,

based on the results of our poll, our first meeting will be on

Monday, November 8, at 14:00. 

If this timeslot does not also work for you as a regular meeting slot during the semester, please let me know soon.

Below is the zoom link that will be used for all of our meetings this semester.

==========

Swen Jacobs is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Seminar: Formal Methods for Finding and Fixing Information Leaks
Time: This is a recurring meeting Meet anytime

Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 956 5113 1029
Passcode: 9$?%Dz
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Dear students,

welcome again to our seminar :-)

We (i.e., myself and Joachim Bard, who will support me as an assistant) are excited to have you with us for our seminar, on a topic that has become very important in recent years, both in research and in practice.

As our first order of business, we need to find a timeslot for our first meeting. Like the whole seminar, it will be held online via Zoom.

Please answer the following poll as soon as possible, latest until Sunday evening: https://terminplaner4.dfn.de/y2Vp5U4EDJXVp3Ik

Looking forward to seeing you next week!