Capstone Design Review

The semester's method, applied once in full — a device, an adversary, and a ranked, quantified list of which channels apply

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

Choose a device and an adversary. Say which of the course’s channels apply to that pairing, rank them, and estimate how much at least one of them actually leaks.

The capstone is not a survey of every channel the semester covered — it is week 12’s design method, run once, by you, on a device you choose. A vague adversary (“someone trying to attack the device”) makes every channel appear to apply and produces a report with no argument in it; a precise one (a named proximity, a named resource budget) rules most channels out immediately, which is the point. The strongest reviews will look like they covered less ground than a weaker one, because they spent their words on the channels that actually survive the adversary’s constraints.

What you submit#

A written design review: the device, the adversary stated precisely, the taxonomy-based reasoning for which channels apply, a ranked list of what to defend first, and a mutual-information estimate (following week 10’s method) for at least one channel on that list. No working exploit against the chosen device is required or wanted — the deliverable is the design judgement, not a demonstration.