Assignment Task
Description
Research Paper Structure The paper should contain at least the following sections. Note that you may add sections and subsections to improve the paper and its structure; for example, you may want to organise the literature review in sub-sections.
1. An abstract provides a compact summary of the report, which hightlight what you have done, and usually include the major findings and their significance. It is very important that based on the abstract a reader should be able to tell whether your paper will be useful to them.
2. An introduction summarizes your research question and its context/ background (such as trends, statistics, recent developments in the field), the practical relevance of this question, the initial goal of your paper (how you expected to answer your research question), the relevance of the question for practitioners or researchers, how you did answer your question, and how the paper is structured.
3. A critical analysis of existing literature relevant to your research question. Identify any interesting results, insights, how effective are the proposed methods, and their limitations. Where applicable, also review relevant practices from high quality sources. Additionally, consider the extent to which methods proposed in research papers have been tested in industry. Due to the constraint on page number, only consider the most relevant, recent papers in the field.
4. Based on the drawbacks and limitation identified in this field, propose and discuss a possible (future) direction to improve or overcome some of these drawbacks. You may also discuss the mitigations or counter measures collected from research and/or current practices that minimise or avoid issues identified by the literature review.
• Note that you do not have to develop a method (since it is out of scope of this assignment), but only provide some interesting thoughts and discussion on a possible direction (i.e., mainly expressing your idea).
5. A conclusion drawing conclusions about what you have achieved, reflecting on your initial goal, and summarize the main findings.
Blockchain and its security prespective
- Blockchain theories and their evolution,
- Smart contracts and distributed ledgers,
- Distributed consensus and fault tolerance mechanisms,
- Blockchain schemes for decentralization,
- Issues of security and privacy surrounding blockchain technology,
- Performance optimization of blockchain and decentralized schemes,
- Blockchain-based protocols and algorithms
- Integration of blockchain with other emerging technologies,
- Permissioned and permissionless blockchains
- Cryptocurrency adoption and transition dynamics
- Transaction graph analysis,
- Fraud detection and financial crime prevention,
- Economics and game theoretic analysis of cryptocurrency protocols,
- Regulation and law enforcement of blockchain technology,
- Usability and user studies,
- Legal, ethical and societal aspects of blockchain and related applications
- Case studies (e.g., of adoption, attacks, forks, scams, …)
Security and Privacy of Cloud services
- Client-side/end-to-end encryption vs. server-side encrytion scheme
- Privacy and accountability of cloud services
- Big data problem in cloud computing and storage
- Data theft in cloud (e.g., Fog computing)
- Automated malware analysis in the cloud
- Health-care management in the cloud
Smart City Security (IoT)
- Secure vehicular communications
- Security of smart road traffic control systems
- Authentication of mobile crowdsourcing devices
- Key management in mobile crowdsourcing
- Access control of task contents and results
- Trust-aware and privacy-preserving task matching and recommendation
- Privacy-preserving truth discovery in mobile crowdsensing
- Privacy-preserving data processing and analytics in the cloud, fog and IoT
- Secure and privacy-preserving federated learning and machine learning
- Trust management of crowdsourcing workers
- Trust-aware incentive mechanisms
- Blockchain-assisted crowdsourcing
- Security and privacy in fog/edge-assisted mobile crowdsourcing
- Secure and privacy-preserving mobile crowdsourcing in smart city applications
Top conferences and journals in cyber security and privacy
You may browse the websites of the following top conferences and journals for the most relevant related works. Note that each conference and journal have a different version each year, e.g., CCS 2019, CCS 2020, etc., therefore you can Google based on the conference name + year + keywords. Also, keep in mind that these are only recommendation, you are allowed to work with papers from other places.
- ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
- USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX)
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
- Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
- European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS)
- ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WISEC)
- ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS)
- Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)
- Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES)
- Annual Privacy Forum (APF)
- Black Hat
- DEF CON
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Journal
- IEEE Security & Privacy Journal
- TDSC – IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing Journal
- TISSEC – ACM Transactions on Information and System Security Journal
- IEEE Communications Magazine
- ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Mitigating circumstances
Extensions are granted when there are serious and exceptional factors outside your control. Everyday occurrences such as colds and hay fever do not normally qualify for extensions. Where possible, requests for extensions should be made before the hand-in date.
Unfair Means to Enhance Performance
The University operates an electronic plagiarism detection service (Turnitin) where your work will be automatically uploaded, stored and cross-referenced against other material. You should be aware that the software searches the World Wide Web, extensive databases of reference material and work submitted by members of the same class to identify duplication. To avoid accusations of plagiarism, give an in-text citation and provide bibliographic details of any source used in the references list. Remember that you can reuse ideas from different sources but not literal text.
Reassessed Work
Reassessment in written examinations and coursework is at the discretion of the Course Assessment Board and is dealt with strictly in accordance with university policy and procedures. Revision classes for referrals will take place during ’reassessment revision, appeals and guidance week’ as marked on the academic calendar.
The mark for the reassessed module is subject to a maximum of 50%.
Please see the UCLAN Academic Regulations and Assessment Handbook for information and penalties related to “unfair means to enhance performance”2 .