Usable Security

Dear students,

Tomorrow's exam will take place at the CISPA lecture hall (where the lecture also took place) and start at 14.15 sharp. Therefore, we kindly ask you to come at 14.00 in order to arrange seating and distribute the exam sheets.

Please note that no materials (slides, hand-written notes, books, calculators) are allowed during the exam.

Dear students,

Today will be the last lecture of this semester. In the first part of the lecture, Matthias will talk about usable privacy and then we will briefly revise the course content to prepare for next week's exam. You will again have the chance to ask questions on the course content.

CISPA is currently shooting an image film and our lecture will be part o this film. Therefore, a camera team will join us during the Q&A session to record a few minutes of our lecture. If possible, please stay with us for the video shoot (the larger the crowd, the better). If you do not want to be filmed, that's fine too. Just let us know and we will either assign you a seat where you are not visible or you may leave the course earlier. If you have any questions or do not feel comfortable during the lecture or video shoot, just let us know!

Thank you very much for your cooperation for the video shoot. And again, thank you so much for being such a great audience during the entire semester.

Dear students,

Due to construction works at the CISPA building, there will be no lecture next week (9th of July). The last lecture of this semester on privacy will then be on the 16th of July. At the end of this lecture you will also have the opportunity to ask questions about the exam.

Thank you so much for all the engagement and discussions during the lectures!

Dear participants,

Mini-Assignment 3 - Key Verification has just been published. You can find it at the end of today's slide set (8 Encryption). Please submit your solutions until 16th of July via CMS. If you rely on the points and want to know by 9th of July whether you are admitted to the exam, we recommend you to submit by 8th of July. In any case you can use these points to compensate missing point from the exam or other assignments.

Have fun explaining key verification to a person who is not a computer scientist :)

Dear students,

As the last lectures were quite long and dense, we will not have a regular lecture tomorrow, but a short (max. 45 min) QA session instead. In the course of tomorrow's session, you may ask any question on the content that you have heard in this lecture and the assignments. We will also use the session to present the third assignment.

Dear students, we are sorry, there was a typo in Section 5 of Assignment two.

"Forward your coded transcribed interview and your codebook to one of your fellow students. You should get their interview and codebook in return. Do not share your coded data with them as two coders should code the data independent from each other! Code your partner’s interview using their codebook and send it back to them. Try to do this step quickly, since your partner cannot continue their work until you are done."

We have uploaded an updated version to CMS.

If you have already shared your coded interview with your interview partner, please send them your data without the codes you assigned. In real life, it would be suboptimal if your partner has already seen your coded data (as coders would not independent). For this assignment, this is not a problem as the learning experience is what counts!

Dear students,

since a few students have contacted us and said that their interview was 5 minutes or shorter we had an internal discussion about the importance of the length of the interview.

We came to the conclusion to set a minimum length of 8 minutes. If your interview is too short, please either ask more questions or interview a second person.

Be advised that one of the learning goals of this exercise is to find out what kind of questions elicit which kind of responses. If you discover that some of your questions are hard to understand or lead to very short answers you can and should change them.

Kind Regards,

Matthias Fassl

Dear students,

Just a quick reminder: *today* is the deadline to submit the first assignment.

We have also published the second assignment. The deadline for submission via CMS is June 4th 23:59.

Should you have any questions, please contact Matthias Fassl fassl@cispa.saarland. If you have trouble to find another student as a second independent coder for your interview data, please contact us and we will try our best to match you with another student.

Please also remember to check the tentative lecture schedule. There will be no lecture next week. 

To those of you who regularly attend the lecture: thank you very much for the lively interactions and the fruitful discussions!

Katharina Krombholz

Dear Participants!

Thank you for your patience. We have published the first assignment sheet on CMS:
https://cms.cispa.saarland/usec_ss19/dl/7/Assignment_1.pdf

Please submit your essay as a PDF until May 14th 23:59 via CMS.

Should you have any questions, I am available via email fassl@cispa.saarland.

Kind Regards,
Matthias Fassl