Ask HN: Cybersecurity Research Topics | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Cybersecurity Research Topics

Hi HN! I am an undergraduate student currently studying CS, and I am interested in pursuing a master's degree in the field of Cybersecurity.

I am looking for suitable research areas in cybersecurity that I could write my first paper on. Any info, pointers you share that you think might be helpful are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Edit: I am working under the guidance of a professor in my university; he asked me to come up with an initial list of topics I am interested in hence the post. I will be meeting him tomorrow for further discussions.

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Honestly, at that level you won't be driving your own research. You will be under the supervision of someone who is driving their own research program.

Your process when applying to do graduate research will be shop around for academics and research groups who are working on things that look interesting to you. You'll send them an email and ask them if they are taking new research students right now (usually the answer would be yes, especially if you have good grades) and what sorts of problems would they give to a new student.

If the initial email looks positive, the next step will be meet them for lunch or a coffee. It won't be called an interview, but that's basically what it will be.

You'll be able to make suggestions and give a general hint of what you'd be most interested in, but at the end of the day it will be up to your research supervisor to both suggest topics for you to research and/or to give feedback on any preferences or interests you have.

I will be working under the guidance of a professor in my university; I forgot to mention this.

He asked me to come up with a list of topics I am interested in, hence the post.

Ah, I get you.

I'd start by skimming some of the professor's papers. That will give you some intuition for what sorts of problems the professor will be able to give the best supervision on. Even if they leave things wide open for you, you're best off being supervised by someone who actually knows their stuff. If you're interested in something which they don't know anything about, you should look for another supervisor.

If looking over their past work doesn't give you any ideas about open problems they can help you with, then it's going to depend on what you already studied and are interested in. Blockchain? Electronic voting systems? Breaking or improving the security or performance of cryptographic primitives? Proving existence or impossibility of certain abstract properties of cryptosystems? Eg how does a paper like https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/49/3/310/564250 grab you?

Thanks a lot for the pointers!

I hadn't thought of going over the professor's previous publications; I'll go do that.

I know a high-level overview of how blockchains work but haven't directly worked with them.

We have been taught cryptography as part of the curriculum, but we never went deeper than SHA-256.

The paper you linked to is very interesting, I read the abstract and found the idea fascinating.

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