Course schedule overview
The scheduling and selection of lecture topics is subject to
minor adjustment as the semester progresses, but the assignment
and exam dates are not expected to change.
Detailed reading and lecture schedule
- Wednesday, September 6th
(6-up slides):
High level overview, roll call,
course assignments and grading logistics. No readings.
- Monday, September 11th
(6-up slides):
Overview of course first half,
examples of software and OS-level vulnerabilities and attacks.
Readings: Anderson Chapter 1, "What Is Security Engineering?";
Anderson Chapter 25, "Managing the Development of Secure
Systems".
- Wednesday, September 13th
(6-up slides):
Low-level
vulnerabilities. Reading: Crispin Cowan, Perry Wagle, Calton Pu,
Steve Beattie, and Jonathan Walpole. Buffer
Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerability of the
Decade, DISCEX 2000. .
- Monday, September 18th
(6-up slides): Low-level attack techniques. Reading: Tilo Müller, ASLR Smack & Laugh Reference (posted with permission of the author)
- Wednesday, September 20th
(6-up slides,
demo notes):
Low-level defenses and counter-attacks, part 1. Reading:
Martín Abadi, Mihai Budiu, Úlfar Erlingsson, and
Jay Ligatti. “Control-flow
integrity”, ACM CCS 2005. (Campus download link)
- Monday, September 25th
(6-up slides,
demo notes):
Low-level defenses and counter-attacks, part 2. Reading: Hovav
Shacham. “The geometry of
innocent flesh on the bone: return-into-libc without function
calls (on the x86)”, ACM CCS 2007, and
Nicolas Carlini, Antonio Barresi, Mathias Payer, David Wagner, and Thomas R. Gross, “Control-Flow Bending: On the Effectiveness of Control-Flow Integrity”, USENIX Security 2015.
- Wednesday, September 27th
(6-up slides):
Defensive programming and design
1. Readings: Jerome H. Saltzer and Michael D. Schroeder, The
Protection of Information in Computer Systems. Part I: Basic
Principles Of Information Protection. David Wheeler, Secure
Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO, chapter 6: Avoid Buffer
Overflow and chapter 7: Structure Program Internals and Approach.
- Monday, October 2nd
(6-up slides):
Defensive programming and design
2. Reading: Daniel J. Bernstein, Some thoughts
on security after ten years of qmail 1.0, CSAW 2007.
- Wednesday, October 4th
(6-up slides):
OS security: authentication and
basic access control. Readings: Anderson Chapter 2 Usability
and Psychology sections 2.4-2.5: "Passwords" and "System
Issues", and Chapter 15 Biometrics.
- Monday, October 9th
(6-up slides):
OS security: access control.
Readings: Anderson Chapter 4 Access
Control and Chapter 8 Multilevel
Security, and Mark S. Miller, Ka-Ping Yee, and Jonathan
Shapiro, "Capability
Myths Demolished" Technical Report SRL2003-02, Systems
Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University.
- Wednesday, October 11th
(6-up slides):
OS security: high assurance?
Readings: Anderson Chapter 9 Multilateral
Security sections 9.1-9.2 and Chapter 26, System
Evaluation and Assurance.
- Monday, October 16th: no lecture or readings, in-class midterm.
The 2013,
2014, and
2015 midterms are available
for comparison.
Now also the
2013,
2014, and
2015 solutions.
This year's midterm is here,
and the solution set here.
- Wednesday, October 18th (6-up slides):
Introduction to network security: protocols and attacks.
Readings: Firewalls and
Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker. William
R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, and Aviel D. Rubin, Second
Edition. Chapter 2, A Security Review of
Protocols: Lower Layers and Chapter 3, Security Review: The
Upper Layers.
- Monday, October 23rd
(6-up slides):
Symmetric cryptography. Readings:
Anderson Chapter 5, Crypography,
sections 5.1-5.6.
- Wednesday, October 25th
(6-up slides):
Public-key cryptography. Readings:
Anderson Chapter 5 section 5.7. And Introduction to
Modern Cryptography, Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell,
Chapter 1, Introduction,
sections 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4.
- Monday, October 30th:
(6-up slides)
Crypto protocols, "S" protocols for the Internet, and PKI.
Reading: David Kaloper-Meršinjak, Hannes Mehnert, Anil Madhavapeddy, and Peter Sewell, "Not-Quite-So-Broken TLS:
Lessons in Re-Engineering a Security Protocol
Specification and Implementation.", Sections 2-3.
- Wednesday, November 1st: Software-based Fault Isolation (guest lecture by Navid Emamdoost,
6-up slides):
Reading: Robert Wahbe, Steven Lucco, Thomas E. Anderson, and Susan L. Graham. "Efficient software-based fault isolation", SOSP 1993. (campus download link).
- Monday, November 6th:
(6-up slides)
Web security part 1. Reading: OWASP
Top 10 - 2017 RC2: The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security
Risks, release candidate.
- Wednesday, November 8th:
(6-up slides)
Web security part 2. No additional reading.
- Monday, November 13th:
(6-up slides)
More crypto protocols, and crypto failures.
Readings: Anderson Chapter 3, Protocols. Another
reference for the protocol parts is the paper "Programming
Satan's Computer", by Ross Anderson and Roger Needham,
Computer Science Today 1995. It provides even more examples of
broken protocols and design principles, but it's optional:
you're not responsible for anything from it beyond what was in
lecture.
- Wednesday, November 15th:
(6-up slides)
Firewalls and intrusion detection.
Readings: Anderson Chapter 11, Physical
Protection; Cheswick and Bellovin Chapter 3 (first edition),
Firewall
Gateways; David Wagner and Paolo Soto, "Mimicry Attacks
on Host-Based Intrusion Detection Systems", ACM CCS 2002
(campus download link).
- Monday, November 20th:
(6-up slides)
Malware and network DoS. Readings:
David Moore, Colleen Shannon, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan
Savage, "Internet
Quarantine: Requirements for Containing Self-Propagating
Code", INFOCOM 2003; Marius Barat, Dumitru-Bogdan
Prelipcean, and Dragoș Teodor Gavriluț, "A
study on common malware families evolution in 2012" Journal
of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, November 2013
(campus download link).
- Wednesday, November 22nd:
(6-up slides)
Privacy-enhancing network overlays.
Readings: Anderson section 23.4, Privacy Technology
(part of chapter 23, The
Bleeding Edge); Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul
Syverson, "Challenges
in deploying low-latency anonymity (draft)".
- Monday, November 27th:
(6-up slides)
Usability of security. Readings:
Anderson Chapter 2, "Usability
and Psychology". Devdatta Akhawe and Adrienne Porter Felt,
"Alice
in Warningland: A Large-Scale Field Study of Browser Security
Warning Effectiveness". USENIX Security Symposium, August
2013.
- Wednesday, November 29th:
(6-up slides)
Electronic voting.
Readings: Anderson section 23.5, Elections (part of chapter 23,
The
Bleeding Edge); Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman,
J. Alex Halderman, David Wagner, Harlan Yu, and William
P. Zeller. "Source
Code Review of the Diebold Voting System", Executive Summary
through Section 3: Major Attacks (pp. i-17); David Chaum,
Richard Carback, Jeremy Clark, Aleksander Essex, Stefan
Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Emily Shen, and
Alan T. Sherman. "Scantegrity
II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems
using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes", EVT 2008.
- Monday, December 4th:
(6-up slides)
Bitcoin. Reading: Satoshi
Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A
Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
- Wednesday, December 7th: final project student presentations #1
- Monday, December 11th: final project student presentations #2
- Wednesday, December 13th:
final project student presentations #3; last lecture
- Monday, December 18th: final exam, 8:00-10:00am in
Mechanical Engineering 108 (same room as lectures)
