The Web Security Seminar

For registration, please apply for this seminar through the central seminar assignment system.

The Web is the foundation of much of today's digital infrastructure: it connects users, services, devices, businesses, and critical applications across the globe. Its openness and ubiquity make it extraordinarily powerful, but also a constant target for attacks. Understanding Web Security therefore means understanding one of the most important and continuously evolving security frontiers.

This seminar explores that frontier through recent scientific papers, open problems, and the arguments that shape where the field is heading next. The focus is not only on learning about advanced technical topics, but on learning how to read, analyze, discuss, and critically evaluate research papers.

This year, The Web Security Seminar is offered both as a seminar and as a proseminar.

In both formats, students will work on advanced topics in Web Security through a combination of presentations and reading-group-style discussions. Each topic is centered around recent research papers, which students will use to understand the state of the art, identify strengths and limitations, and discuss how the work advances the field.

Seminar students will give a presentation and write a seminar paper.

Proseminar students will give a presentation, but will not write a seminar paper.

This seminar adopts a strict no-LLMs/GenAI policy. The goal of the course is for students to develop and exercise their own critical thinking when reading, analyzing, and discussing research papers. For this reason, all intellectual work in the seminar, including presentations, discussions, and seminar papers, must be carried out independently and without the aid of generative AI tools.