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 4th (6-up slides): High level overview, course assignments and grading logistics. No readings.
• Monday, September 9th (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 11th (6-up slides, 8-up): 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 (IEEE version, some formatting issues) (local mirror of author's version), DISCEX 2000.
• Monday, September 16th (8-up slides, combined): Low-level attack techniques. Reading: Tilo Müller, ASLR Smack & Laugh Reference (posted with permission of the author)
• Wednesday, September 18th (8-up slides, combined): 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 23rd (8-up slides, combined, 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 25th (8-up slides, combined, demo notes): 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, September 30th (8-up slides combined): Defensive programming and design 2. Reading: Daniel J. Bernstein, Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0, CSAW 2007.
• Wednesday, October 2nd (8-up slides, combined): 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 7th (8-up slides, combined): 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 9th (8-up slides, combined): Side and covert channels. Readings: Dawn Song, David Wagner, and Xuqing Tian. “Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH”, USENIX Security 2001; and Claudio Canella, Jo Van Bulck, Michael Schwarz, Moritz Lipp, Benjamin von Berg, Philipp Ortner, Frank Piessens, Dmitry Evtyushkin, and Daniel Gruss. “A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses”, USENIX Security 2019.
• Monday, October 14th (8-up slides, combined): OS security: high assurance? Readings: Anderson Chapter 9 Multilateral Security sections 9.1-9.2 and Chapter 26, System Evaluation and Assurance.
• Wednesday, October 16th (8-up slides, combined): 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 21st: no lecture or readings, in-class midterm. The 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, and spring 2019 midterms are available for comparison. Now also the 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017 solutions. Now also, this semester's midterm and solutions.
• Wednesday, October 23rd (8-up slides, combined): Symmetric cryptography. Readings: Anderson Chapter 5, Crypography, sections 5.1-5.6.
• Monday, October 28th (8-up slides, combined): 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.
• Wednesday, October 30th (8-up slides, combined): 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.
• Monday, November 4th: (8-up slides, combined) Web security part 1. Reading: OWASP Top 10 - 2017: The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Risks.
• Wednesday, November 6th: (8-up slides, combined) Web security part 2. No additional reading.
• Monday, November 11th: (8-up slides, combined) 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 13th: (8-up slides, combined) 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 18th: (8-up slides, combined) 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 20th: (8-up slides, combined) 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 25th: (8-up slides, combined) 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 27th: (8-up slides) Electronic cash and blockchains. Reading: Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
• Monday, December 2nd: (8-up slides, combined) 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.