Policies

Guiding Principles

The following three statements underlie and support every policy in this class:

1. “The purpose of this class is for us to work together to help you learn”

2. “Your mental, emotional, social, and physical health are always at least as important as this class”

3. “This class is an environment fully inclusive of all people”

Disabilities and Accommodations

Disabilities will always be accommodated: my job is to help each and every one of you learn. Please contact me and/or have the Office of Disability Accommodations contact me. I will respond promptly to any and all such communications. I will never judge you or your disabilities, and I will avoid outing you to others. Though you are welcome to share any details that will help me assist in your learning, you are never required to share any private details of your life with me.

The office of Disability Services asks that I include the following text. I encourage you to work with them (they're great!) and to contact me early, but please always ask for accommodations, even if you've left it to the last minute. (Note that there are no exams in this course).

Late Policy

Assignments have two purposes: to help you learn, and to help both of us assess your learning (so that you can learn better, and I can help you learn better). Because assignments play such an important role in your learning, it is very important to me that you do the assignments. As a consequence, I do not deduct points for late assignments, since I find that doing so discourages completing the assignment and gaining its learning-related benefits.

For any and all assignments, you may take a 48 hour extension, no questions asked. To do so, You may use such an extension for any number of assignments. If those two extra days are not sufficient for you to complete the assignment, you MUST contact me to let me know. When you contact me, I will ask you to tell me about your plan for completing the assignment, and we will work together to make sure that plan is a reasonable and effective one that supports both your learning and your health and wellbeing.

The purpose of this policy is to help you balance the requirements of this course with your mental, physical, and emotional health. I recognize that your personal life is important, and my goal with this policy is to help you find the flexibility you need. You are never expected or required to tell me any personal or private details of your life. However, I am always available to listen should you feel that sharing anything will help me support you.

tl;dr: Submit this form for an automatic 48-hour extension on any assignment, no questions asked. If you require more than 48-hours of extension, you must email me and we'll work out a plan that best serves your learning and your well-being.

Email Policy

I will typically respond to email and Piazza posts within 48 hours during the week. I typically will not reply to email over the weekend. I ask that you check Piazza and your email regularly and respond promptly as well.

Research Day

The job of a tenure-track professor (e.g., me) includes the obligation both to teach and to perform scholarly research. Because of this, each semester I choose one day of the week to be my "research day". On this day, I do not take meetings unrelated to my research, I do not schedule regular office hours, and I often am not on campus. I am more than happy to schedule ad-hoc meetings with you on any other day of the week, or to see you in my regular office hours.

This semester, my research day is Wednesday.

Grading Policy

Best practices for teaching include the use of specific, assessable learning goals. I aim to give you a grade which is based on your work on assignments which asses you on those specific goals. I also believe that the best learning takes place when you are able to learn from your mistakes, and when I am able to give serious feedback on your work. For this reason, the grading structure for this class is somewhat unusual.

Division of Points

Rather than divide points to individual assignments, your grade is composed of scores corresponding to your performance in the specific learning goals of the class. This focuses my grading on using assessments to determine that you have learned the skills I aim for you to gain, rather than arbitrary obeisance to the assessments themselves. Consequently, the points for your grade will be divided as follows:

(20%) Communicating Security and Privacy

Assessed through writing and other communication assignments. Includes "technical" writing skill (grammar, style, voice); choice of audience and topic; use of analogy and simplification as appropriate to the audience; reading and distilling scientific papers; and the tailoring and construction of arguments.

(20%) Ethics and Inclusivity

Assessed through your preparation for and thoughtfulness in the ethics debate, inclusive security and privacy analysis and design exercise, and the final project. Includes knowledge and thoughtful application of ethical principles; skill at incorporating the needs of specific groups into your analysis and design of systems; and ability to identify the differing values and needs of specific groups.

(20%) The Security Mindset & Threat Modeling

Assessed through the writing assignments and final project. Includes the ability to think like an attacker; identify assumptions of systems and test them; characterize systems in terms of the elements of threat models; and perform risk analyses based on those threat models.

(20%) Cryptography

Assessed through Lab 2 and several in-class/problem-set style activities. Includes knowledge of cryptographic primitives and techniques; the ability to describe the underlying mathematical ideas which allow us to prove modern cryptography secure; and the ability to implement, attack, and reason about cryptography.

(20%) Technical Security Skills

Assessed through Labs 1, 2, and 3, and through design exercises and the final project involving the designing of secure systems. Includes knowledge of the way various technical systems work; the ability to identify, isolate, and characterize vulnerabilities in such systems; and to attack systems by exploiting those vulnerabilities through technical means.

Participation

You may notice that participation is not included in the grade. This is an intentional choice, justified by the following beliefs that I hold (but which shouldn't be interpreted to criticize other professors' choices):

• Any policy which grades on attendance risks punishing students with legitimate reasons to miss class, including temporary or chronic illness, obligations to care for family, etc.

• Participation grades are often highly subjective, and thus risk significant implicit bias.

• Grades based on participation in discussions are unnecessary when active learning and frequent small group activities are used to make participation normal rather than extra.

• Communication skills are explicitly included in the learning goals for this class, so they will be directly assessed through in-class and out-of-class assignments, rather than through the potentially-subjective lens of participation grades.

• Participation doesn’t directly correspond to whether you succeed on the (other) learning goals of the class, and I strongly believe that your grades should be determined entirely by whether you succeed at the learning goals I've articulated, since that way you know what is expected of you.

Normally, this is where I ask the rhetorical question "so do I not have to come to class?", but this semester is asynchronous, so perhaps it is better phrased as "do I not have to watch the lectures and do the reading?". The answer is that I will ask you to write reading journals, complete quizzes, and create study guides, and I will use these materials as one of the ways that I assess whether you've completed the learning goals, which are always the basis on which you are graded in this course. Typically, completing the readings and watching the lectures will be required to meet those learning goals.

My Status As A Mandatory Reporter Under Title IX

I am a "responsible employee" of Wellesley College, which means that I am obliged to share with the Title IX office any disclosures of discrimination, harassment, or sexual misconduct. The Wellesley College Title IX office would like to remind you of the details of this policy as follows:

Intellectual Honesty and Cheating

I trust you - as a mature person invested in your learning and in your relationships with others - not to cheat, plagiarize, or otherwise commit acts of intellectual dishonesty. If at any time you feel that you are between a rock and a hard place, such that your only option is to cheat, don’t. Instead, email me, or talk to me in office hours. I will not judge you; I will direct you to every available resource; and I will offer any help I can to support your learning and all aspects of your health and wellbeing.