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[Important] LSF registrationWritten on 28.10.25 by Giancarlo Pellegrino Dear students, A quick housekeeping note: Please make sure to register or withdraw from the seminar in LSF by November 12, 2025. LSF registration will open by the end of this week. Also, don’t forget to register for the exam in LSF once it’s available. Best, |
Important schedule updateWritten on 20.10.25 by Giancarlo Pellegrino Dear students, I've made a small update to our session schedule after realizing that December 22 falls within the semester break, and many of you may already have travel plans. The key changes are as follows:
Dear students, I've made a small update to our session schedule after realizing that December 22 falls within the semester break, and many of you may already have travel plans. The key changes are as follows:
Please make a note of these adjustments. --- |
The Web Security Seminar
For registration, please apply for this seminar through the central seminar assignment system.
The Web Security Seminar will teach students to present, analyze, discuss, and summarize papers in different areas of Web security. The seminar combines a reading group with (almost) weekly meetings and a regular seminar, where students will write a seminar paper.
Each student will get a topic assigned, consisting of a lead and a follow-up paper. The student will present the follow-up paper in a 20-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute Q&A. Afterwards we will all discuss the lead paper as a reading group. All students must read the lead paper and, before each session, must submit a summary with strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, each student will write a seminar paper on the assigned topic, for which the two papers serve as the starting point. Special attention should be paid at fulfilling the seminar paper's objective.
Any use of LLMs/GenAI is strictly forbidden for producing or polishing the text of the seminar papers. We will thoroughly investigate any suspicious text we find in the submitted manuscripts, e.g., via an oral exam in which the student is invited to explain the text.
Important Details
- Kickoff on Monday, 20.10.2025, 10:15-12:00, CISPA main building (C0), room 0.02
- (Semi) Regular seminar sessions on Mondays. First session is on Monday, 03.11.2025, 10:15-12:00
- Each Thursday at 23:59 before each session
- All students: submit the paper summary (one page max) with discussion points: three items for the strengths, three items for the weaknesses, and future work
- Only the presenter: submit your slides for feedback by your supervisor.
- Attendance in all meetings and submission of summary and discussion points for each topic is mandatory. For exceptional cases, contact the teaching staff.
- The Web Security Seminar will not offer a hybrid participation to the seminar.
Grading
1. Requirements for a passing grade:
- Attend all sessions
- Submit:
- the summaries of all sessions; your slide deck for feedback before your presentation and the final slide deck of your presentation
- the first version of your seminar paper. The first version must be complete with no placeholders. The completeness of your draft will be graded.
- the final version of your seminar paper addressing the feedback of your supervisor
2. Grade structure:
- 30%: Presentation (E.g., timing; quality of the slides; clarity; exposition; and QA)
- 60%: Seminar paper (E.g., compliance with the submission rules; correctness of the references; adherence to the objectives; quality of writing; structure; completeness of relevant papers; correct representation of research results)
- 10%: Participation to the paper discussions
Seminar Paper Details
We will cover the different types of seminar paper during the kickoff session.
All seminar papers are due on (see below). Based on your submission, you will receive feedback within one week and have until (see below) to improve your paper. The paper grading will be on the final version. Note that the first submission must already be sufficient to pass. If you submit a half-baked version of the paper, you will likely fail the course.
Each paper must use the provided template and all the text must be written via Overleaf in a project monitored by the organizers of the seminar. It must not be longer than 8 pages, not counting references and appendices. Note that appendices are not meant to provide information that is absolutely necessary to understand the paper, but rather to provide auxiliary material. Papers can be shorter, but in general the provided page limit is a good indicator of how long a paper should be.
Schedule, List of Topics, and Papers
(*): Double session, i.e., TWO presentations and ONE discussion
(**): The discussion of Session 6 main paper, while originally planned, will not take place.