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I have to write a term project about WPA/WPA2: I should find and read five articles and write a sort of summary of the technology citing those articles. And no, the professor will not help find articles.

It is a long shot, but if there is a reader who did academical reading on this, could he/she then please recommend me such articles.

Would be greatly appreciated.

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    Let me try to summarize your question in different words: You professor considers finding a handful articles is part of the assignment and therefore refuses to recommend your five articles. Now you ask us to do that part of your homework? You know very well how to use a search engine. Enter smart terms, learn something, come up with your own opinion and choose some articles that support your opinion and some articles that don't and explain why you think they are right/wrong, have good or bad arguments. We're happy to help explain things if your stuck, but you'll have to try yourself first.
    – jippie
    Apr 20, 2012 at 22:03
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    I think your 'summary' is unfair. I could use Google (or academic databases) and the results would be overwhelming. That is what most of my classmates do (they have been assigned other topics), but I know that they will not find the best articles, not even 5 good articles, but simply find some 5 random articles. I was hoping for instance that some reader is doing a phd on this, and would share his recommendations, I am not asking people to do any googling for me. Apr 20, 2012 at 22:22
  • Furthermore, people have asked for article recommendations here before, and with useful answers. Apr 20, 2012 at 22:25
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    It is also worth mentioning that in many cases, when you are given these assignments, part of the purpose is for you to learn about how to conduct a literature search. There are right ways to do a literature search, and usually if you do it right you can identify which are the good articles. If you ended up with 5 random articles, you haven't done the literature search right. If you want tips on how to do a good literature search, that'd be a great question to ask here -- but please create a separate question for it.
    – D.W.
    Apr 21, 2012 at 6:08
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    I get your points. Before posting I did a bit of Googling yes, and read some abstracts, but I did not dive into the articles because it takes so much time, and that is what I would like to avoid. Even if an article is called 'A survey of ...,' I assume that there are many such and some of them could be poor quality work by graduate students. Then I searched at this site for 'academic' to see if it was ok to ask for academic articles. I found this. Apr 21, 2012 at 8:09

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I'd suggest the following:

Read Wikipedia's article and search on this site for WPA and WPA2. (Actually, that would have pointed you to many of these, and then standard literature search techniques find the rest.)

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A few suggestions that might help you in your search...

  1. The Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson did an episode on WPA earlier this year - Episode 335 (http://twit.tv/show/security-now/335). Episode 336 was a Q and A with some further questions answered and 337 was on a WPS vulnerability. While those aren't technically articles, they might point you in the right direction.

  2. You can generally get a lot of good information from places like SANS, CERT, NIST and the like.

  3. Stack Exchange posts should give you some ideas.

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Yes, your assignment is stupid and asking for help is justifiable

Your professor is doing a poor job. His philosophy is probably that he will throw you in the lake and if you can swim you will have learned a lot, and if not, well then ... he probably did not care.

Being totally new in a field, and not having research experience, it is impossible to know which papers to start with. So I totally understand your questions.

Some of the answers to this post, the arrogant and unfriendly ones, come because people just imagine that the professor knows what he is doing. These people have probably gone to good universities. Crappy universities sometimes have really crappy professors.

Asking you to read five papers is stupid. It took me one day to read a paper, and I considered myself an average computer science student. The result of your assignment will be that most students just pretend. They write something about the protocol, and then browse each article to find at least one (perhaps irrelevant) fact to weave into the report.

When I wrote my thesis most of the literature was suggested by my professor. Note: That was my thesis! Your professor is sending you out of the classroom without recommending any...

My best suggestion would be

I can't suggest any articles. But the approaches below might work.

Asking someone who can give advice on which papers. I guess you didn't know any. Well, when I have a programming task that I can't solve I often use StackOverflow or other forums. So you could try and write in a forum. I would expect that in a security forum there would be people from the academic world, a PhD perhaps, that have worked with the field. They should be able to recommend a few articles. However, you must prepare for arrogant answers.

D.W. suggests reading the Wikipedia article and use those sources. That is a really good approach.

Another approach is to follow references in papers. This is not actually something I've practiced, but I imagine it would work. Browse (don't read) some random papers on the topic, and look at their references. There will probably be some papers that a lot of papers refer to. That probably means they are helpful sources, or just sources that form the basis. Pick one of those. Read it through, and make sure you understand it. Of course this article will be one of the five. In this article, when you've read it carefully, you will see references to other articles, and you will have some understanding of what these articles cover. Pick four more among these.

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