Project
You must demonstrate
that you know how to research, are current in the chosen topic, have developed
significant expertise in it and can communicate effectively about your work.
Evaluation: Among the factors that will be used for evaluation are: significance and originality, thoroughness of research, depth of understanding displayed and presentation.
Topics: The topics must be closely related to the course objectives. I will provide a list of suggested topics.
Some possible ideas: These are related to some of the problems that either we have worked on recently or have thought about. You need to do your own research, however a related paper is mentioned to serve as a starting point.
Economic modeling of vulnerability markets A related article, another.
Storage technology reliability A related article, a related one on drive reliability.
Software test coverage models: Compare models that have been proposed to relate test coverage and defects found. A related paper, another paper.
Impact of correlated failures on reliability. Some related articles mine, Space Shuttle O rings, wall-street melt-down.
Conduct experiments with programs with known bugs to collect data about defects found and test coverage. Related paper.
Investigate the economics of software testing using actual field data. Related paper.
Develop model for economic tradeoffs due to security issues using actual data. Related paper.
Investigate quantitative methods for evaluating and predicting human reliability using actual data. Related paper.
Investigate reliability evaluation in the presence of correlated failures in software/hardware using data and analytical methods. Related paper.
Develop models for risk evaluation due to vulnerabilities, incorporating discovery and remediation. Related paper.
Obtain an elegant algorithm for generating antirandom vectors, or prove that existing procedure is an algorithm. Related paper.
Investigate antirandom testing where the internal nodes have antirandom values. Related paper.
Develop optimal binning algorithms for defective chips using cost factors for false rejection, false acceptance and test effort. Related paper, another one
Quantitative measurement of the impact of security breaches. Related article and another article.
Methods for quantitative modelling of corruption in society. Related paper..
Modelling Human reliability in the context of careless or deliberate action. Related paper.
Modelling disaster recovery by estimating RPO, RTO Related paper, another paper
Modelling the advantage of geographically dispersed servers for disaster recovery. Related paper. Related paper.
The risk of Target-like breaches: Consider technology, probabilities and costs. Note that "risk" includes both the probability of an event and the impact.
Using fuzzing to discover zero-day vulnerabilities a related article, and another.
Hypervisor security A related article.
Intrusion Tolerance A related article.