Resources
Background for the case studies, project tracks, and systems on the schedule. Updated through the semester as guests and materials are confirmed.
Guest sessions & anonymity. Several sessions run under the Chatham House rule or full anonymity. Recording during guest sessions requires explicit prior consent, and information shared in confidence must not leave the course without permission.
Project Tracks
Semester projects fall into one of four tracks, chosen during the Project Lab in Week 3:
- Accountability & auditing — verifiability in systems whose operators cannot be trusted.
- Democracy-affirming technology — systems that strengthen democratic processes.
- Surveillance & censorship measurement — measuring deployed censorship and surveillance infrastructure.
- Resilience of critical digital infrastructure — keeping systems reachable under stress.
Systems & Codebases
Projects and case studies build on real systems rather than toy assignments:
- Snowflake — WebRTC pluggable transport for reaching users inside blocking networks (Tor Project).
- Tor — anonymity network: circuit design, bridge distribution, and pluggable transports.
- MVPNalyzer — automated, at-scale auditing of commercial VPNs. link TBD
- Geedge Networks / Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG) — leaked commercial censorship-and-surveillance stack studied from source. link TBD
- Censored Planet — remote, planetary-scale censorship measurement.
- Certificate Transparency — append-only logs as a deployed accountability system.
Monday sessions are case studies; see the schedule for the full lineup with dates, speakers, and descriptions.
Ethics & Law
Background for the ethics-and-scope session and the course's ground rules for measurement that touches networks and machines you do not own:
- The Menlo Report — ethical principles guiding ICT research.
- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — 18 U.S.C. § 1030.
- EFF: Coders' Rights — Vulnerability Reporting FAQ.
- EFF: A Grey Hat Guide.
Research at Michigan
- Censored Planet — global censorship measurement (Ensafi Lab).
- Security & Cryptography research at Michigan CSE.
Accessibility
Students requiring accommodations should contact the Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) office and share documentation with the instructor within the first two weeks of class.