Computer and Network Security Group   TORSEC thesis projects publications thesis members contact us

To know subjects available for graduate or undergraduate thesis, contact Prof. Antonio Lioy by mail (lioy at polito dot it) or phone (011-564-7021)

The preferred format for thesis written inside the TORSEC group is LaTeX. If you don't have it available, the following tools are suggested:

• teTeX (processing system for Unix/Linux)
• MikTeX (processing system for Win32; includes TeXworks, a simple IDE)

For documents written in Italian, for portability remember to set your editor to the ISO-8859-1 encoding (i.e. latin-1 chracter set) and not to UTF-8.

Formatting rules for the thesis of Politecnico di Torino are given by the TOPTESI package, available as:

• pointer to latest version - ZIP archive or CTAN folder (local copy here, version 5.59 copied on 28-mar-2012)

• "Saper comunicare" (local copy here)

Addtional rules for TORSEC thesis:

• produce output in PDF format, by means of either latex+dvipdf or pdflatex
• if you create the PDF by running latex followed by dvipdf, then use native Postscript fonts (for size and speed of printing):

  \usepackage{times}
  

  However if you create the PDF file directly with pdflatex then there is no advantage in using the Postscript fonts (because pdflatex is not using these fonts but it emulates them).
• create figures with PowerPoint and then export them individually in PDF, PNG, JPEG, or GIF format (in order of preference) for inclusion in LaTeX via the graphicx package; this requires adding the following line in the header of the LaTeX file:

  \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
  \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.pdf,.png,.jpg,.gif}
  

  and then including the picture file via the following command (the text in brackets is to be used only if you want to fit the picture to the page size, otherwise the natural dimension of the picture would be used):

  \begin{figure}
  \centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{results.pdf}}
  \caption{Experimental results.}
  \label{fig:results}
  \end{figure}
  

  Note that PDF is the preferred format, because it allows inclusion of the picture both in PS and PDF.
  To create a reference to the figure, use the following syntax:

  ... look at Fig.~\ref{fig:results} for the diagram of the results.
  

• input accented letters directly (using an editor that supports the ISO-8859-1 character set, such as Vim), after adding the following line in the header of the LaTeX file:

  \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
  

• to create hyperlinks (for URLs and citations) use the hyperref package:

  \usepackage{color}
  \usepackage[a4paper,colorlinks=true,urlcolor=blue,citecolor=blue,linkcolor=blue]{hyperref}
  

  In this way internal document references (e.g. page and section numbers) are automatically turned into links while external web references must explicitly be formatted by using the following syntax:

  \url{http://security.polito.it}
  

• create abbreviations for frequently used words, so that their formatting can be easily changed should the need arise; for example insert into the header:

  \def\ipsec{IPsec}
  \def\rfc[1]{RFC-#1}
  

  remember that for using these abbreviations you need to insert a backslash after them, unless there is a puntuaction mark:

  The \ipsec\ architecture is defined in the standard \rfc{1825}.
  

• (for toptesi) do use Roman ordinals for numbering the introduction pages:

  \begin{document}
  \renewcommand{\lapagina}{\Roman{page}}
  \frontespizio
  \indici
  ...
  \renewcommand{\lapagina}{\arabic{page}}
  % here go the chapters
  ...
  

• (for toptesi) extend the page height by the following commands:

  \advance\voffset -5mm
  \advance\textheight 20mm
  

• (for documents that don't use toptesi - e.g. coursework reports) define the page margins using the geometry package:

  \usepackage[top=2cm, bottom=2cm, left=2cm, right=2cm]{geometry}
  

Last modified on Wednesday, 28-Mar-2012 12:27:17