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.

The "Lecture topic" links just link to the detailed information further down the page, so they may not seem to go anywhere if the detailed information is already visible in your window.

Detailed reading and lecture schedule

• Wednesday, September 4th (8-up slides): High level overview, course assignments and grading logistics. No readings.
• Monday, September 9th (8-up slides, updated with announcements): Overview of course first half, examples of software and OS-level vulnerabilities and attacks. Readings: Anderson 3rd Ed Chapter 1, "What Is Security Engineering?", second edition equivalent Chapter 1, "What Is Security Engineering?"; Anderson 3rd Ed Chapter 27, "Secure Systems Development", second edition equivalent Chapter 25, "Managing the Development of Secure Systems".
• Wednesday, September 11th (8-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 (IEEE version, some formatting issues) (local mirror of author's version), DISCEX 2000.
• Monday, September 16th (8-up slides): Low-level attack techniques. Reading: Tilo Müller, ASLR Smack & Laugh Reference (posted with permission of the author)
• Wednesday, September 18th (8-up slides) 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): 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): 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): 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): OS security: authentication and basic access control. Readings: Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 3, "Psychology and Usability", section 3.4: "Passwords", second edition equivalent Chapter 2 Usability and Psychology sections 2.4-2.5: "Passwords" and "System Issues". Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 17, "Biometrics", second edition equivalent Chapter 15 Biometrics.
• Monday, October 7th (8-up slides): OS security: access control. Readings: Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 6, "Access Control", second edition equivalent Chapter 4 Access Control. Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 9, "Multilevel Security", second edition equivalent Chapter 8 Multilevel Security. 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 (main 8-up slides, extra 8-up slides on transient execution): 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): OS security: high assurance? Readings: Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 10, "Boundaries". second edition equivalent Chapter 9 Multilateral Security. Anderson 3rd edition Chapter 28, "Assurance and Sustainability", second edition equivalent Chapter 26, System Evaluation and Assurance.
• Wednesday, October 16th (8-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 21st: Electronic voting. Readings: Anderson third edition section 25.5, Elections; second edition equivalent 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.
• Wednesday, October 23rd: no lecture or readings, in-class midterm. The 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, spring 2019, fall 2019, and 2021 midterms are available for comparison.