Course Schedule
The class meets Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30–3:30 PM. Monday sessions are case studies; Wednesday sessions are project labs, reviews, and presentations. The schedule below is a guide—guest availability and project needs may shift individual sessions. Any changes will be announced at least one week in advance.
1. Course Overview & the Public Interest
Defining public-interest systems and their characteristic failure modes; course structure, the four project tracks, and team formation.
2. Case Study: Censored Planet
Mechanisms of nation-scale censorship — DNS injection, IP/SNI-based blocking, TCP RST injection, DPI — and remote measurement at planetary scale.
3. Case Study: The Geedge Networks Leak
Anatomy of a commercial censorship-and-surveillance appliance from leaked Geedge/TSG source: rule formats, protocol parsing, and deployment fingerprinting.
4. Case Study: MVPNalyzer and Auditing the VPN Market
Automated auditing of commercial VPNs at scale: DNS/IPv6 leaks, kill-switch failures, shared and rebranded infrastructure, and unverifiable no-logs claims.
5. Project Lab: Track Selection
Hands-on rotation through the four project tracks; exercise existing tooling to its failure points, then commit to a team and track.
Teams formed; track selected6. Case Study: Tor and Anonymity at Scale
Tor's circuit design and threat model, and where anonymity breaks in deployment: bridge distribution, active probing, and Snowflake's WebRTC transport.
7. Lab: Snowflake in Practice + Problem Scoping
Deploy a Snowflake proxy and Tor bridge, then scope each project to a semester-sized system with explicit in- and out-of-scope boundaries.
8. Case Study: Chrome Security - Certificate Transparency
Designing verifiability under an untrusted operator; Certificate Transparency's append-only logs as the deployed case study.
9. Team Pitches
Ten-minute pitches — problem, stakeholders, adversary model, success criteria — critiqued on scope and threat-model assumptions. Feedback feeds directly into the proposal write-up.
10. Case Study: Network Architecture for Adversarial Environments
Protocol design against an on-path adversary: traffic and website fingerprinting, flow correlation, active probing, and the obfuscation arms race.
11. Proposal Workshop
Working session on the proposal write-up — problem statement, related work, contribution, and the steps-and-timeline plan — with staff feedback on drafts; standing up the repo and CI baseline.
- Repo + CI live; architecture diagram; team working agreement
12. Case Study: Election Security and Verifiable Outcomes
End-to-end verifiability of election outcomes under operator distrust: software independence, voter-verified paper trails, and risk-limiting audits.
13. Proposal Presentations
Each team presents its proposal — problem statement, related work, contribution, and plan — and defends its threat-model assumptions before the instructors and external reviewers with no stake in the design.
Proposal presentation (in class)14. Build Session & Feedback
In-class implementation with staff rotating for design and code review; each team presents one concrete technical blocker.
15. Case Study: Machine Learning for Greater Good
Learned models on both sides: classifier-driven censorship and traffic analysis versus ML-assisted detection and triage — and where each fails.
16. Build Session with Outside Review
Implementation session with an external security practitioner rotating through teams for review.
17. Case Study: Accountability and Auditing Systems
Designing verifiability under an untrusted operator; Certificate Transparency's append-only logs as the deployed case study.
18. Progress Demos & Feedback
Teams demonstrate a running system against the success criteria committed in the proposal; structured written feedback from staff and two peer teams.
19. Case Study: Secure Messaging in the Field
Deploying secure messaging under adversarial pressure: key distribution, metadata resistance, trust establishment, and operational and legal constraints. Chatham House rule.
20. Usability Testing
Usability testing with participants representative of the target user population.
21. Case Study: Resilience and Access to Critical Infrastructure
Reachability when the network is adversarial: national shutdowns, BGP hijacks and RPKI, encrypted DNS transports, and anycast/CDN behavior under stress.
22. Scalability Review & Partner Check-ins
Load limits and failure points, annual operating cost, and the operational handoff model beyond the semester; partner check-ins.
23. Documentation Sprint & Impact Assessment
Deployment documentation — README, operational runbook, explicit threat model and non-goals, known limitations — plus the impact assessment.
24. Case Study: Getting Technical Work to Land (Press, Policy, and Disclosure)
Translating technical results for press and policy audiences; coordinated-disclosure timing and protecting sources and in-country collaborators.
25. Public Demo Day
Public demonstration of final prototypes: a short talk and live demo for invited partners, faculty, and the university community.
- Final project write-up due Sun. Dec. 6, 11:59 PM
26. Final Project Presentations
Final presentations and live demos of each team's system, followed by handoff planning: documentation, license selection, and a maintenance and security-response plan.
Final project presentation (in class)27. Retrospective & What Happens Next
Team retrospectives, course feedback, and continuation paths for surviving projects: deployment, publication, open-source release, or partner handoff.
Final peer and team evaluations due