Master of Science in Technology Thesis planning instructions
Master’s Degree Programme in Information Security and Cryptography
Networked System Security
- THESIS STRUCTURE
Abstract page
Table of Contents
Chapters
- Introduction
General introduction to the topic area. Leading to identifying some problem/shortcoming/R&D need that is relevant and will be discussed in the thesis. The two last paragraphs of the introduction are:
- “In this thesis a new… is proposed …” where you identify the things that is done in the thesis, why it is important and relevant (and to whom), how should it be solved, what parts of it are solved in this thesis and what is left for future work, how will the field be affected by the thesis (“in which way the world will be a better place after this thesis is written”)
- The rest of the thesis is organised as follows. “Give an outline of the thesis, explaining how the chapters of the thesis are relevant for the problem identified in the previous paragraph and how the chapters relate to each other. When you do it here, no-one will need to question it later when reading the thesis as you have already explicitly stated the necessity of each chapter.”
- Background/ Literature/ Theory
Relevant findings from history, industry, state-of-of-the art. Theoretical background necessary to understand the rest of the thesis and the choices made in it. There can be more than one of these chapters if necessary; for example; one chapter dealing with background and literature and another one dealing with the details of some specific communication protocol that needs to be understood in order to understand the rest of the thesis.
- Description of existing target system
Could be for example a firewall/IPS system, a microprocessor, an embedded system, a software suite, … Whatever is the platform on which you will build your own contribution.
- Specification and design of something new based on 2 & 3 (for example, improving a part of the target system based in the theoretical analysis and analysis if shortcomings of existing system)
- Implementation and verification of (a part of) the newly specified and designed “something”, analysis of results, discussion. This could also be simulation and analysis of simulation results.
- Conclusion
Concluding remarks, discussion on the relevance of obtained results, are they generalisable beyond this thesis, what sort of future work is planned or could be done based on the work in this thesis
- References
Properly formatted list of referred literation. Also, the university takes this seriously; be sure to be accurate when providing in-text citations (mandatory). Harvard Refencing format is to be used. Please note that originality check will be performed on the final work through Turnitin.
- THESIS PLAN
To proceed, next you need to draft a thesis plan: The plan needs to be provided and discussed with you supervisor before proceeding with the main work. Please also be advised that each chapter needs to be presented to and accepted by the supervisor before moving to the next. This is to carefully monitor your progress and avoid episodes of ambiguity.
- Working title
- 5 lines of description: what is the problem, why it is relevant, how do you plan to solve it and test the solution, what are the expected outcome
- Draft table of contents (1-2 levels of subsection headings)
All this should fit to the about one A4 sheet.
Thesis length. Since this is a Master’s thesis, length between 50-70 would be accepted (excluding list of references- References are not counted as)
