[dansmyers]

I wouldn't worry too much about coming up with a "novel" idea on your own. Your advisor should help you select and refine a topic. That's a major part of their role.

Published research is more like a conversation among its participants. There's a stream of thought and continuity that connects each paper to its predecessors. Ideas come out of engaging with the conversation and thinking about new directions and open questions. One of my advisors used to talk about "research taste" -- the process of learning what good research looks like and how to choose topics, which develops over time through exposure to the field.

I'd encourage you, at this stage, to just focus on defining your interests. If you're interested in bluetooth security, for example, why is that? What do you find engaging about that topic? Then you can build from there: who's written about that and what results have they produced? Are there good survey papers about the current state of the art? What are the key subfields and their main questions?

You could think of this as "pre-research" -- getting oriented toward an area and building background knowledge. Let it be driven by your curiosity. Find a thread that seems promising and pull on it for a little while. Use tools like Deep Research for help, but you still want to read the key papers.

A good undergrad project is often a tweak of an existing result. I really like projects that use a well-defined, standard methodology, which allows the student to focus on developing research question and the work of data collection, analysis, and writing -- without having to design the entire process from scratch. If you find a paper that you like, think about keeping the same basic approach, but modifying the research question to explore a different angle on the topic. Conclusions will often suggest open questions for further work.