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Final Report: Initial Feedback and some additional Hints
Written on 28.02.2022 10:36 by Swen Jacobs
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.