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sethnielson edited this page Jan 28, 2019 · 6 revisions

Ethics

From the University

The strength of the university depends on academic and personal integrity. In this course, you must be honest and truthful, abiding by the Computer Science Academic Integrity Policy:

Cheating is wrong. Cheating hurts our community by undermining academic integrity, creating mistrust, and fostering unfair competition. The university will punish cheaters with failure on an assignment, failure in a course, permanent transcript notation, suspension, and/or expulsion. Offenses may be reported to medical, law or other professional or graduate schools when a cheater applies.

Violations can include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments without permission, improper use of the Internet and electronic devices, unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition. Ignorance of these rules is not an excuse.

Academic honesty is required in all work you submit to be graded. Except where the instructor specifies group work, you must solve all homework and programming assignments without the help of others. For example, you must not look at anyone else’s solutions (including program code) to your homework problems. However, you may discuss assignment specifications (not solutions) with others to be sure you understand what is required by the assignment.

If your instructor permits using fragments of source code from outside sources, such as your textbook or on-line resources, you must properly cite the source. Not citing it constitutes plagiarism. Similarly, your group projects must list everyone who participated.

Falsifying program output or results is prohibited.

Your instructor is free to override parts of this policy for particular assignments. To protect yourself: (1) Ask the instructor if you are not sure what is permissible. (2) Seek help from the instructor, TA or CAs, as you are always encouraged to do, rather than from other students. (3) Cite any questionable sources of help you may have received. On every exam, you will sign the following pledge: "I agree to complete this exam without unauthorized assistance from any person, materials or device. [Signed and dated]". Your course instructors will let you know where to find copies of old exams, if they are available.

Course-specific Ethics Policies

This course involves a lot of information about building secure systems, but some information about hacking them. We will be, within the very narrow confines of a safe learning space, acting as non-ethical hackers. PLEASE DO NOT EVER USE THIS AS AN EXCUSE FOR NON-ETHICAL BEHAVIOR OUTSIDE OF THIS LEARNING ENVIRONMENT.

Additionally,

  1. You may not use materials from previous semesters of this course
  2. Although you will be working together on all the major labwork, you must keep logs of code you wrote personally
  3. Highly ethical behavior is expected when using computing tools and techniques especially when working at on-campus or remote computing facilities.
  4. This class, for teaching purposes, requires you to behave in a way that, in almost all other contexts, is unethical and often illegal. You need to understand how the “bad guys” think in order to protect against them. That should in no way encourage you to become one of the “bad guys.”
  5. Even within this class, you need to recognize the limits of the attacks you can carry out against other students. The whole point of the PLAYGROUND environment, that we will introduce later, is to provide you an opportunity to safely spar with each other. Do not, under any circumstances, try to attack a classmate outside of the PLAYGROUND environment. It is your responsibility to understand what is permissible. If you have any questions, please ask the instructor for guidance. Report any violations you witness to the instructor.

Penalties: Any student found cheating on an assignment will receive a 0 on that assignment. Please note, some assignments are worth a significant portion of your final grade. There is absolutely no mercy for this. You just don't cheat. If you aren't sure if what you're doing is cheating, it's cheating. If you think you'd have to explain to me why it isn't cheating, it's cheating. If you really think you should be allowed to do something, but you have questions, you will come and ask Dr. Nielson. Otherwise, it's cheating. In previous years, we have had students fail exams, assignments, and major lab work for various academic violations. JUST DONT DO IT.

Further Reading

You can find more information about university misconduct policies on the web at these sites:

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