Each presentation should consume half of a class meeting. You should prepare a 20-minute presentation, leaving a few minutes for questions and discussion. You and your partner can split this time however you want (including having one of you do all the talking). However, you should give one cohesive presentation, rather than two separately-prepared segments. The goal of having you work in teams is to get stronger presentations. You should design the presentation (content, structure, etc) as a team.
Guidelines:
These are technical presentations to a technical audience. Give details of algorithms, languages, technologies, or other information as relevant for your topic. High-level overviews suitable for the evening news will not earn you many points.
Use concrete examples. If you are presenting a tool or a language, we should see fragments of actual code or actual interactions with a tool. If you are presenting an attack, show how to construct an actual instance of it. If you are presenting on a proposed technology, provide concrete examples of how the proposal would work (and examples of how it wouldn't).
Cover both strengths and weaknesses of any approaches relevant to your topic. If you are presenting a tool or language, for example, don't just show what it can do. Try to identify useful tasks in the space of the tool/language that it doesn't support well. Think of this presentation as helping the rest of the security team at your workplace decide whether to adopt a similar approach.
Where appropriate, cover the four components of policy, mechanism, assurance, and incentive. Most topics relate to some of these more than others. Give time appropriate to each based on the nature of your topic. The goal is to get you to think beyond the purely technical aspects of your topic though, into the surrounding implications. For example, many topics have privacy implications or interact with legal issues. You should talk about these where relevant, just at a sufficient level of depth for a serious tutorial rather than a casual overview.
The medium is up to you. You may use Powerpoint, but you certainly don't need to. Live demos, whiteboard talks, creative interpretations (so long as they highlight technical content) are all fair game here.
Good presentations will not be thrown together the day or two before. You will need a bit of time to read up on your topic, distill the information, and assemble the presentation. I'm expecting you to put a good 10 hours into preparing this.
Grades will be based on the material you chose to present, the detail at which you presented it, and the clarity of the presentation itself.
I'm glad to consult with you outside of class as you prepare your presentation. Feel free to show me draft slides, outlines, etc (though keep in mind that I can't give you much useful feedback the night before you are due to present).
Here are some starting links relevant to each topic (I'll be getting them up for all topics over the next few days). You don't have to present exactly the content of these papers, but I expect these to figure into your presentation to some extent unless you clear different references with me beforehand. (This is mainly to ensure that presentations are aiming for the appropriate technical depth). Some of the papers contain references to other useful information, so check those out in preparing your presentation.
To access links into ACM's Digital Library, you will need to be inside the WPI network (either directly or via VPN).
Look into socio-technical issues as well as how mobile banking works technically.
Generally a rich topic with lots to be found. No need to stick to these, but do bring socio-technical dimensions into the discussion.
A case study or two on successful attacks and their broader implications would make sense here.
Richard Clarke and Herbert Lin are two useful names from which to start searches on this topic.
Presentation should include how to steal someone's data in a public wifi hotspot.