Note: If you’re reading the PDF version of this syllabus, you should switch to the HTML version online if possible. The PDF rendering of the original markdown has weirdness with lists, and none of the links to papers work in the PDF.
Prof. Crandall’s office hours: Thursdays 9am to 11am in Jitsi
TA: Wednesdays 2pm to 5pm in Jitsi
The TA is Jiahui Gao. Please do not contact the TA directly, all course-related communications with the TA should be through online discussion or office hours.
“Uses cryptography for secure protocols over networked systems, including signatures, certificates, timestamps, electrons, digital cash, and other multiparty coordination.” This is a direct quote from the catalog, note that “electrons” probably was intended to mean “elections”.
Prerequisite(s): Computer Engineering or Computer Science graduate student OR Software Engineering MS student OR Online Computer Science nondegree-seeking graduate student
The grade will be calculated as follows:
Rubric for attendance (10 points for each day broken up into 5 points for reading the assigned paper and 5 points for participating in discussion):
Note that the paper discussions will be available over Zoom, so you can attend them remotely but you must do so LIVE.
Final letter grades are based on the following scale where x is the percentage: 97.0 <= x <= 100.0 is an A+, 93.0 <= x < 97.0 is an A, 90.0 <= x < 93.0 is an A-, 87.0 <= x < 90.0 is an B+, 83.0 <= x < 87.0 is an B, 80.0 <= x < 83.0 is an B-, 77.0 <= x < 80.0 is an C+, 73.0 <= x < 77.0 is an C, 70.0 <= x < 73.0 is an C-, 60.0 <= x < 70.0 is D, and x < 60.0 is an E.
There is no textbook for the course, neither required nor recommended. All materials used for the course lectures and assignments will be widely and publicly available and/or licensed open source.
For every course you are entitled to:
In the event of an excused absence (which you must communicate with the instructor about), you can make up for the absence in your attendance grade by reading the paper and participating in the online discussion.
The course will be a combination of recorded lectures that you can watch on your own time (but need to keep up on) and biweekly meetings (in-person in the classroom or live over Zoom) to discuss papers.
Attendance and participation are required, but will not be recorded by the instructor or TA. You will self-grade based on the above rubric (i.e., the honor system).
For questions and answers regarding course materials and homework please use the course’s discussion board or come to office hours, unless there is some compelling reason to use email. Use email for course administrativia (requesting an extension, you need a signature from me for some reason, etc.) Feel free to email me any time for anything, I won’t shame you, but if you’re asking questions about the homework or lectures you’re much more likely to get a timely response in the course discussion platform than via email.
All homeworks should be done in Linux. You can use other OSes, but if you need help (tool recommendations, help with debugging, troubleshooting error messages, etc.) I will only try to help you with OS-specific things if you’re using Linux.
You are responsible for your own file backups and time management. E.g., feel free email me, or send as a private post in Piazza, the day before something is due, “I worked on it all day and then my VM crashed and I lost my file!” I won’t shame you, but that’s not grounds for an extension and I’m not going to be able to do anything about it to make sure you submit your homework on time. I recommend keeping your code and other work for this course in a private repository (e.g., on github) that you periodically commit to.
Please refrain from anything that will distract you or others from fully engaging in the class. Disruptive behavior will be dealt with according to university policies. While attendance and classroom behavior are not explicitly part of the grade, you are hereby notified that your attendance and classroom behavior are considered as part of your overall performance in the course to the extent allowed by university policies.
You may not record class discussions without permission.
As stated above, no textbook is required for this course.
Students will be evaluated on attendance and participation, their performance on homework assignments, and their performance on exams. Details are above.
Homework due dates will be posted in advance on the class website and announced in class. All times will be Mountain Standard Time, i.e., Arizona time.
This is a HYBRID course where roughly 25% of the lecture time will be in-person discussions (these may or may not be recorded, but will be available remotely over Zoom LIVE), and 75% of lecture time will be recorded lectures that I will post online. You are expected to keep up with the recorded lectures at the same pace as if we were meeting every Tuesday and Thursday. I’ll be explicit with every lecture announcement when you need to watch that lecture by (in many cases the paper we’re discussing won’t make sense if you haven’t watched the lectures).
Here is the schedule of in-person in-class meetings to discuss papers, and the papers we will discuss on each date:
Essentially, we will meet physically in the classroom the first day of classes, one week after that on January 17th, and then every other week from the 17th through the end of the semester.
Students in this class must adhere to ASU’s academic integrity policy, which can be found at https://provost.asu.edu/academic-integrity/policy. Students are responsible for reviewing this policy and understanding each of the areas in which academic dishonesty can occur. In addition, all engineering students are expected to adhere to both the ASU Academic Integrity Honor Code and the Fulton Schools of Engineering Honor Code. All academic integrity violations will be reported to the Fulton Schools of Engineering Academic Integrity Office (AIO). The AIO maintains record of all violations and has access to academic integrity violations committed in all other ASU college/schools.
This course has a zero-tolerance policy:
-Any violation of the academic integrity policy (detailed below) will lead to a failure on this course. -The violation will be reported to the AIO.
If you need more time to accomplish a homework assignment, please tell the instructor and ask for an extension. Extensions will be considered for circumstances that are/were beyond your control. Do not attempt plagiarism.
For this course, you are allowed to use code snippets that you find on the Internet as long as you specify clearly in the comment of your source code where the code snippets come from, and the source snippets existed before the assignment was assigned. You are not allowed to upload any part of your solution online or show it to other students. Using other students’ answers or code, past or present, with or without a citation is seen as a violation of the academic integrity policy. You may or may not be asked to turn in your source code for any given assignment. In any case, if I suspect cheating I reserve the right to require you to come to my office and show me a live demonstration of your source code and answer questions to get full points. Some assignments are graded automatically by grade scripts with anti-cheating mechanisms built-in. Do not cheat – it is not worth risking your grade and your academic profile.
As part of the first homework, you will generate or receive a 128-bit token that will serve as a sort of student ID for the course. You are not to make this token public; share it with any of your classmates; share it with anybody other than the instructor, yourself, and the TAs; find out the token of any of your classmates; or in any way compromise the confidentiality policy that only you yourself and the instructor/TAs for the course should know your security token. If you violate this policy that will be considered cheating as per the policy above.
Title IX is a federal law that provides that no person be excluded on the basis of sex from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity. Both Title IX and university policy make clear that sexual violence and harassment based on sex is prohibited. An individual who believes they have been subjected to sexual violence or harassed on the basis of sex can seek support, including counseling and academic support, from the university. If you or someone you know has been harassed on the basis of sex or sexually assaulted, you can find information and resources at https://sexualviolenceprevention.asu.edu/faqs. As a mandated reporter, I am obligated to report any information I become aware of regarding alleged acts of sexual discrimination, including sexual violence and dating violence. ASU Counseling Services, https://eoss.asu.edu/counseling is available if you wish to discuss any concerns confidentially and privately. ASU online students may access 360 Life Services, https://goto.asuonline.asu.edu/success/online-resources.html.
All course content and materials, including lectures (Zoom recorded lectures included), are copyrighted materials. You may not share outside the class, upload to online websites not approved by the instructor, sell, or distribute course content or notes taken during the conduct of the course. See ACD 304-06, “Commercial Note Taking Services” and ABOR Policy 5-308 F.14 for more information.
You must refrain from uploading to any course shell, discussion board, or website used by the course instructor or other course forum, material that is not the student’s original work, unless the students first comply with all applicable copyright laws; faculty members reserve the right to delete materials on the grounds of suspected copyright infringement.
Students, faculty, staff, and other individuals do not have an unqualified right of access to university grounds, property, or services. Interfering with the peaceful conduct of university-related business or activities or remaining on campus grounds after a request to leave may be considered a crime. All incidents and allegations of violent or threatening conduct by an ASU student (whether on- or off-campus) must be reported to the ASU Police Department (ASU PD) and the Office of the Dean of Students.
Suitable accommodations will be made for students having disabilities. Students needing accommodations must register with the ASU Disabilities Resource Center and provide documentation of that registration to the instructor. Students should communicate the need for an accommodation in sufficient time for it to be properly arranged. See ACD 304-08, Classroom and Testing Accommodations for Students with Disabilities.
Any information in this syllabus may be subject to change with reasonable advance notice.