Your project proposal -- a 1-2 page detailed writeup stating your project plan – is due by September 9th, 5pm IST. You will submit on MS Teams. The top conferences in computer security are:

• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: 2026 edition: https://sp2026.ieee-security.org/
• ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security: 2025 edition: https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2025/
• USENIX Security Symposium: 2026 edition: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26
• Network and Distributed Systems Security: 2026 edition: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2026/

Over 1000+ papers are published across these four conferences each year. Browse the papers, and figure out what interests you and submit a concrete project proposal. You are not required to choose from the papers published at these conferences, and can suggest your own topic or browse papers published at older editions of these conferences.

One possible approach is to pick a paper, and propose a detailed action plan of how you plan to extend one of these papers – it could be additional implementation of an idea that you have, more experiments, etc. Do NOT ask me for research project ideas, this is supposed to be based on your interest and your initiative.

Teams (either individual or teams of two) will be pursuing a research project that will involve doing some literature research, writing a project proposal, extending prior-art in some non-trivial way, implementing and benchmarking your work, writing a project report and making a presentation. Substantial system building work is expected in the project and the work will be evaluated as such.

Warning: This project involves significant learning and system building. If you put off the work until the last minute, you will not be able to complete it. Every part of the project builds on the prior part, so you will really start lagging behind unless you work consistently throughout the semester. There will be no extensions granted for any part of the project.

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