Usable Security

Dear students,

This is to inform you that there will be no lecture tomorrow, 22nd of June. We will not introduce an additional lecture slot and slightly reduce the content for this semester. However, we will provide an additional office hour/Q&A session before the final exam.

Of course you are free to enjoy your Monday morning off, but we also kindly ask you to evaluate this lecture on the official lecture evaluation platform provided by UdS: https://qualis.uni-saarland.de/eva/?l=124181&p=n2ou2p. You may complete the evaluation any time between Monday and Friday next week (22nd - 26th of June).

We are really looking forward to your feedback. Note that in addition to the official evaluation, you may always provide direct feedback to help us improve this lecture.

Dear students,

Great to see that more solutions are being submitted throughout the day. I really wish you all the best for the remaining hours until the deadline! You can do it! If you cannot finish the assignment in time, please submit whatever you have. Still, you will have a learning experience that gives you tremendous preparation for the exam. Also note that you can use the bonus points from the mini assignments to compensate for missing points and to jump grades. 

For the future: Please keep in mind that the environment here is a safe space - ask questions when content from the lecture is unclear; use the cryptpad, the forum or just unmute yourself and ask. There is no such thing as stupid questions. 

Dear students, 

to finally make it clear: we will NOT extend the deadline for assignment two for the following reasons:

- a large number of students has managed to finish the assignment within the given time. Some students have already submitted their solutions a couple of days ago. We want to treat all students equally, hence all students have the same amount of time in order to compete the assignment.

- As I extensively mentioned, we are doing our best to help if students ask concrete questions about the subject matter. As the requests for deadline extensions did NOT raise any specific difficulties, I do not see a point why additional time will solve the issue and I get the impression that not the assignment itself, but lack of preparation for this course and time planning are the main issues. As a student, it is your job to plan when to solve your assignments and to start early enough. Writing a parser should be a rather straight-forward and easy task for an advanced computer science student and again, as already stated multiple times, statistics was a pre-requisite for this course. We also provide plenty of resources to fill knowledge gaps through self-study.

- I am also a bit concerned that some students ask for additional time, but do NOT take the opportunity to ask questions in class or in the forum. We are spending a lot of time and effort to create an environment where you can actively learn and test your knowledge, e.g., by collaboratively solving challenges and scenarios during the lecture (which are actually chosen to prepare you for solving the assignments, see the collaborative scenario to evaluate authentication mechanisms). I have also repeatedly offered the opportunity to ask questions immediately during the lecture (e.g., by unmuting yourself and engaging in discussion, or by using the cryptpad). We also have a forum where you can ask specific questions. If you make use of these opportunities, solving the assignments within 2 weeks should be doable.

And finally, I would like to thank all students who attend the lecture regularly and especially those who engage in discussion and use the forum. You are doing a great job! We are very happy to have you in class.

To those of you who have submitted the assignment already: congratulations, you did a great job! Keep up the good work and be proud of yourself! :)

If you have any feedback or any suggestions how to improve this lecture, please let us know. We are spending a lot of time and effort into making this lecture a great learning experience for all of you. If there is anything specific that we can do better, let us know.