This course is an introduction to computer security. I will teach this course in 4 modules. Each module consists of 4-6 lectures. The modules are described here.

Lecture dates | Time | Place: Tue-Thu | 1-2:20 PM | QNC 2502

STAFF (Office hours)

Instructor: Dr. Vijay Ganesh	Office: DC 2530	Date / Time: Tue - Thu / 2:30 - 3:30 PM
TA: Carlos Moreno	Office: EIT 4103	Date / Time: Wed / 3:30 - 4:30 PM
TA: Frank Imeson	Office: E5 4119	Date / Time: Fri / 1 - 2 PM
TA: Alireza Sharifi	Office: DC 3576	Date / Time: Tue / 9 - 10 AM

Lecture Schedule

Date	Lectures	Assigned Reading (Books chapters, papers)
Jan 8, 2013	Lecture 1: Introduction to computer security. basic concepts such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, SYN cookies, policy and mechanism, trust and assumptions. Material sourced from Matt Bishop's book Introduction to Computer Security, and lecture slides by Professor Bill Young of UT, Austin.	Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.
Jan 10, 2013	Lecture 2 (Slides 1-25) (With permission and courtesy of Professor Dan Boneh of Stanford University): Control hijack attacks. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities and stack smashing attacks, integer overflow vulnerabilities, string format vulnerabilities. Attacks that combine different kinds of vulnerabilities.	Smashing the stack for fun and profit by Aleph One. Exploiting format string vulnerabilities by scut/team teso Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson
Jan 15, 2013	Lecture 3 (Slides 26 - 58) (With permission and courtesy of Professor Dan Boneh of Stanford University): Techniques to prevent, detect and recover from control hijack attacks. Typesafe languages. Address space layout randomization (ASLR). Stack canaries.  Safe libraries (LibSafe). Heap-spraying attacks.  Techniques to protect against heap-spray attacks. Project guidlines	ASLR Stack and Laugh Reference (Some details about ASLR) by Tilo Muller. Stack Canaries by StackGuard by Cowan et al. Defeating ASLR, Canaries etc. (Stack exchange discussion) Software needs seatbelts and airbags by Emery Berger, U. of Mass, Armherst. Heap Feng Shui in JavaScript by Alex Sotirov Slammer worm
Jan 17, 2013	Lecture 4: Testing, analysis and verification for security. Automated testing techniques, program analysis for security, fuzzing, whitebox fuzzing, model-checking and advanced verification techniques.	Fuzzing Automatically generating inputs of death by Cadar et al. (Concolic or dynamic symbolic testing) Information-flow based whitebox fuzzing by Ganesh et al. Model checking for security protocols by Mitchell et al. Nice Stackoverflow page on program analysis. Automated bug-finding and debugging by Koushik Sen.
Jan 22, 2013	Lecture 5: Malware, computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, detailed description of the Stuxnet worm and comparison with the Aurora worm.	Stuxnet under the microscope
Jan 24, 2013	Lecture 6: Malware analysis. Static and dynamic techniques to detect malware. Signature-based detection. Polymorphism and metamorphism. Semantic-aware detection. Obfuscation. Dynamic information-flow tracking for runtime monitoring. Explicit and implicit taint.	Semantic-aware static malware detection Taintdroid Limits of static analysis for detecting malware
Jan 29, 2013	Lecture 7: SAT solvers for software engineering and computer security. Why we need SAT solvers. Concolic testing revisited. Basic DPLL SAT solver with backjumping.	MiniSAT Solver Lingeling Solver The Grasp paper by Joao Marques-Silva et al. The zCHAFF paper by Lintao Zhang et al. Survey paper on SAT solvers by Selman et al.
Jan 31, 2013	Lecture 8: Basics of cryptography. One-time pad. Stream and block ciphers. MACs. Public-key cryptography. Uses of cryptography.
Feb 5, 2013	Lecture 9: Side-channel analysis and attacks. Timing, power, cache,...
Feb 12, 2013	Lecture 10: Motivation for public-key cryptography, Basic number theory, Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, RSA public-key encryption scheme, digital signatures
Feb 14, 2013	Lecture 11: Cryptographic hash functions. Properties such as collision resistance (weak and strong), inversion resistance. How hash functions work.
Feb 26, 2013	Lecture 12: (also available in pptx format): Browser security. How browsers work. Same-origin Policy. JavaScript and XSS attacks.
Feb 28, 2013	Lecture 13 (pptx format): CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks
Mar 5, 2013	Review of material covered so far in preparation for the mid-term
Mar 6, 2013	Mid-term
Mar 7, 2013	No class
Mar 12, 2013	Lecture 14: Click-jacking attacks (Excellent Talk by David Lin-shung Huang of CMU) ; Discussion of solutions to mid-term exam questions
Mar 14, 2013	Lecture 15: Security in control systems by Professor Shreyas Sundaram. Detailed analysis of the Stuxnet virus.	Anatomy of the Stuxnet virus (a short video)
Mar 21, 2013	Lecture 16 (pptx format): Network security. Basics of TCP/IP and BGP. TCP Spoofing. BGP attacks. DNS cache poisoning attacks.
Mar 26, 2013	Lecture 17 (pptx format): The problem with formal verification (undecidable) and model-checking (PSPACE-complete). Principles of secure design: Isolation, compartmentalization, principle of least privilege, principle of safe defaults, access control (ACLs, capabilities and role-based).	OS Security (Morrie Gasser. 1988) OS Security (Trent Jaeger. 2008) Secure Unix and Linux programming
Mar 28, 2013	Lecture 18 (Overview of computer security concepts. Distributed Denial of Service attacks)
April 2, 2013	Lecture 19 (pptx format): Lecture by Dr. Glenn Wurster from Blackberry. Security in the real world.
April 4, 2013	Project demo starting 1 PM @ EIT 3142
Apr 17, 2013	Final Exam from 9 AM - 11:30 AM in Rooms RCH 103, 105

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the following people who have been very kind in sharing with me the lecture materials, notes etc. from their respective courses, and given me permission to use them as I wish in this course.

Professor Dan Boneh (Stanford)
Professor Matt Bishop (UC, Davis)
Professor David Brumley (CMU)
Professor Kevin Du (Syracuse)
Professor Mahesh Tripunitara (Waterloo)
Professor Koushik Sen (Berkeley)
Professor William D. Young (UT, Austin)
Professor Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov (University of British Columbia)
Professor Cristian Cadar (Imperial College, London)