CS590U: Access Control: Theory and Practice

CS590U

Access Control: Theory and Practice

Instructor: Ninghui Li

Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:30pm to 2:45pm. ABE 205.
Office hour: Tuesdays 3pm to 4pm, Wednesdays 2pm to 3pm, Thursdays 3pm to 4pm, and by appointment.

Syllabus

Slides for Past Lectures

Schedule for Student Presentations

Grading:

Students will have a semester-long medium-size project. See the syllabus for a list of project topics. Students are also welcome to come up with project ideas. There will be one homework besides the project, given in October. There will be no exam or programming assignment in this course.

Pre-proposal (due Thursday Sep 4)
It should be about half a page to a page, listing two or three projects you find most interesting. Describe why you find them interesting and related backgrounds you have. If you want to propose another project idea, you should do so using the pre-proposal. Describe the objectives and the plan, and give a list of references.

Proposal for the project (due Tuesday Sep 30) 20% of the grade
The proposal should include survey of the literature. Detailed description of the plan.

One homework (Given in October) 10% of the grade

Lecture (Sometime in November) 20% of the grade

You will need to give a lecture in the class, on topics related to your projects, e.g., using the survey material in your proposal.

Final presentation for the project (During the last two weeks of class) 15% of the grade

You may think this as a mini-defense of the result you obtained in the project.

Final report for the project (Due at the end of the class) 35% of the grade

General Info:

This course is for graduate students in Computer Sciences and ECE. Undergraduate students interested in taking the course should contact the instructor. In addition to covering established results in this area, we will also investigate the state of art of access control theory and techniques both in research literature and in commercial systems.

The goals of this course are the following.

Give students a systematic and deep understanding of access control theory and techniques. The focus of this course is not on giving a listing of the various models and techniques developed for access control, but rather on understanding the effectiveness and limitation of these models and techniques. While examining research results, we ask the following questions: What are the problems this piece of work tries to solve? To what extent does it solve the problems? Are these the right problems to solve? How could this result be used in practice? What other problems can be asked? While examining existing systems, we ask similar questions about the access control features in these systems.
Give students (especially beginning graduate students) some exposure to research activities such as literature research, independent thinking and analysis, interacting with the instructor and peer students, and organizing and presenting materials and results.
Help interested students develop long term research interests in this area.

This course will be divided into three parts.

The first part, about first half of the course, will be lectures given by the instructor.
The second part, about one-third of the course, will be lectures given by students on a topic related to their projects.
The final part will be presentation of the result of the project.

Prerequisites:

Information security: CS526 or equivalent required; taking CS526 concurrently is sufficient.
Theory of computation: CS483 or equivalent highly recommended. CS584 a plus but not necessary.
Database systems: CS448 or equivalent highly recommended.

Please contact the instructor if there is any question about prerequisites.

Textbook/References

No textbook is required; the main source of reference will be papers, lecture notes, and slides. See the syllabus for reading lists for the course and for individual projects.