Course talk:CPSC522/Password cracking using PCFGs and Neural Networks

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Thread titleRepliesLast modified
Critique018:22, 19 March 2018
Critique021:53, 15 March 2018
Critique022:16, 12 March 2018

The descriptions for both papers are well written and are in full details. You can add sections to have a more informative comparison between two papers and show us why one papers work's approach can be more helpful or how its using the other paper.

  • The topic is relevant for the course. 5
  • The writing is clear and the English is good. 5
  • The page is written at an appropriate level for CPSC 522 students (where the students have diverse backgrounds). 5
  • The formalism (definitions, mathematics) was well chosen to make the page easier to understand. 5
  • The abstract is a concise and clear summary. 3 (you can give more details on what you are going to talk about and what will be the discussions)
  • There were appropriate (original) examples that helped make the topic clear. 5
  • There was appropriate use of (pseudo-) code. 5
  • It had a good coverage of representations, semantics, inference and learning (as appropriate for the topic). 5
  • It is correct. 5
  • It was neither too short nor too long for the topic. 4 (it could be a bit shorter on the paper review and then added your point of view instead)
  • It was an appropriate unit for a page (it shouldn't be split into different topics or merged with another page). 5
  • It links to appropriate other pages in the wiki. 5
  • The references and links to external pages are well chosen. 5
  • I would recommend this page to someone who wanted to find out about the topic. 4
  • This page should be highlighted as an exemplary page for others to emulate. 5

I would give it 18 in total.

BornaGhotbi (talk)18:20, 19 March 2018

This is a really interesting topic (good choice!).

As a general note, there's some formatting which could be improved throughout the article - for example the paper names should be formatted differently to the sentence (quoted or italicized), and lists (e.g. in results for both papers) should be presented in numbered or bullet-pointed form. Aside from the formatting I think this is pretty well written.

I think an important criticism of paper 1's results is that the comparison is on guesses, not time, where time is arguably the more important measure—guessing passwords with half as many guesses isn't that significant an improvement if your guesses take 5x longer to construct, and this isn't necessarily something that can be optimized away in implementation; the PCFG method isn't computationally trivial.

The note on transference learning is cool. Generally the approach of helping users by trying to crack their passwords with cutting-edge techniques is interesting - I think some kind of summary/conclusion on your part to wrap up the findings from both papers would be valuable.

You really should reference more than just the 2 papers you're reviewing! You should also use wiki links for other UBC wiki pages, not standard hyperlinks.

On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means "strongly disagree" and 5 means "strongly agree" please rate and comment on the following:

  • The topic is relevant for the course. 5
  • The writing is clear and the English is good. 4
  • The page is written at an appropriate level for CPSC 522 students (where the students have diverse backgrounds). 5
  • The formalism (definitions, mathematics) was well chosen to make the page easier to understand. NA add some if they're in the papers!
  • The abstract is a concise and clear summary. 3 Could be improved, abstract on second paper isn't quite right, focuses on a client-side password helper tool
  • There were appropriate (original) examples that helped make the topic clear. 3 Would be good to see some specific examples of passwords+their guess counts for different tools
  • There was appropriate use of (pseudo-) code. 4
  • It had a good coverage of representations, semantics, inference and learning (as appropriate for the topic). 5
  • It is correct. 4
  • It was neither too short nor too long for the topic. 5 good length
  • It was an appropriate unit for a page (it shouldn't be split into different topics or merged with another page). 5
  • It links to appropriate other pages in the wiki. 4
  • The references and links to external pages are well chosen. 2 could do with more for additional context
  • I would recommend this page to someone who wanted to find out about the topic. 4
  • This page should be highlighted as an exemplary page for others to emulate. 3

If I was grading it out of 20, I would give it: 17

AlistairWick (talk)21:53, 15 March 2018

It was an interesting topic! Though i found some minor shortcomings, which are listed below:

  • Grammatical mistakes and abstract sentences were found.
  • Perhaps also give links of papers in the beginning, so that its easy for the user to read.
  • I found that not much detail was presented from paper 2.
  • Also, i didn't find any formalism or equations in the article, was it because there was none in the papers you discussed.

I a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means "strongly disagree" and 5 means "strongly agree" please rate and comment on the following:

  • The topic is relevant for the course. -5
  • The writing is clear and the English is good.- 4
  • The page is written at an appropriate level for CPSC 522 students (where the students have diverse backgrounds).-4
  • The formalism (definitions, mathematics) was well chosen to make the page easier to understand.-4
  • The abstract is a concise and clear summary.-5
  • There were appropriate (original) examples that helped make the topic clear.-4
  • There was appropriate use of (pseudo-) code. -4
  • It had a good coverage of representations, semantics, inference and learning (as appropriate for the topic). -5
  • It is correct. -5
  • It was neither too short nor too long for the topic. -4
  • It was an appropriate unit for a page (it shouldn't be split into different topics or merged with another page). -5
  • It links to appropriate other pages in the wiki. -5
  • The references and links to external pages are well chosen.-5
  • I would recommend this page to someone who wanted to find out about the topic. -5
  • This page should be highlighted as an exemplary page for others to emulate.-4

If I was grading it out of 20, I would give it: 16

EktaAggarwal (talk)22:16, 12 March 2018