This page is organized by the weeks of the quarter in which lectures were given. The weeks are in inverse order, on the assumption you will most often be looking for the most recent week.
This class will be taught by Peter Reiher. The textbook is Computer Security: Art and Science, by Matt Bishop. Assigned readings are from this book, unless otherwise indicated. Dr. Bishop has also published a second textbook that contains selected sections of this book, with a similar title. I can't guarantee that all material assigned will actually be in this other book, and it will definitely be at different pages if it's there at all.
The TA for the course is Peter Peterson -- pedro@lasr.cs.ucla.edu. The labs for this course will consist of 5 hands-on, practical and exploratory projects covering security-related topics, plus a small introduction to the lab software. Office hour and discussion section information, the lab manual and all necessary materials for the labs are located here.
I am running an NSF-sponsored research study on the effectiveness of using practical exercises as a teaching tool for computer security classes. If you are taking the class this quarter, and are willing, it would be helpful if you could participate in this study. Participation is strictly voluntary and has no effect on one's grade. Details on the study and a copy of the consent form volunteers should sign and return are available here.
The final exam for this class will be held on Saturday, June 5, from 1-4 PM in 5420 Boelter Hall, unless you have made arrangements to have your exam proctored elsewhere. The exam will be similar in style to the midterm exam. It will cover all material discussed in the class; however, material only covered in the homework exercises, but not in lectures or assigned readings, will not appear on the test. The test will be open book/open notes, but you may not use a computer or other electronic device.
No readings from the textbook this week.
Observations from the DNSSEC Deployment, E. Osterweil, D. Massey, and L. Zhang, 3d IEEE Workshop on Secure Network Protocols, 2007. A good, short description of DNSSEC and interesting information about its degree of deployment.
Secure Border Gateway Protocol (Secure BGP),, Stephen Kent, Charles Lynn, Karen Seo, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, Vol. 18, No. 4, April 2000. The original paper proposing Secure-BGP.
Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, R. Dingledine, N. Mathewson, and Paul Syverson, Usenix Security Symposium, 2004. Tor is an improved version of onion routing that improves the security, privacy, and performance of the original onion routing mechanisms.
SQLrand: Preventing SQL Injection Attacks, Stephen Boyd and Angelos Keromytis, 2nd Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS) Conference, 2004. A paper on handling SQL injection attacks on web servers.
Slides:
NOTE: The prologs for lectures 18 and 19 have not been taped yet. They will be available by the middle of next week.
NOTE: I neglected to post the slides for the prolog lectures for week 8. They have now been posted. Also, the slides I actually posted for lectures 14 and 15 were the ones from last year, not the ones from this year. The changes are very slight, but the links in place now are the correct ones. My apologies for the mistakes.
No textbook assignment for this week.
Papers:
Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software, Peter Gutmann, Usenix Security Symposium, 2002. Practical examples of the problems of using good crypto in real programs.
A Framework for a Collaborative DDoS Defense,, George Oikonomou, Peter Reiher, Max Robinson, and Jelena Mirkovic, ACSAC 2006. The basic DefCOM paper.
SOS: An Architecture for Mitigating DDoS Attacks, Angelos Keromytis, Vishal. Misra, and Dan Rubenstein, IEEE JSAC, vol. 22, no. 1, January 2004.
SAVE: Source Address Validity Enforcement, Jun Li, Jelena Mirkovic, Mengqiu Wang, Peter Reiher, and Lixia Zhang, Infocom 2002. This paper describes a protocol that allows routers to determine the proper incoming interfaces for different addresses, in full deployment.
Slides:
Textbook: Chapter 22 (pages 613-641)
Textbook: Chapter 19, sections 19.1-19.2.3.3 (pages 497-523)
Papers:
Exploiting Underlying Structure for Detailed Reconstruction of an Internet-scale Event, Abhishek Kumar, Vern Paxson, and Nicholas Weaver,Internet Measurement Conference, November 2005. A whole lot cooler than its title might lead you to believe.
How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time, Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson, Nicholas Weaver, 11th Usenix Security Symposium, August 2002. A classic analysis of how fast worms can move in the Internet.
Slides:
Textbook: Chapter 25 (pages 723-767)
Web links:
Efficient Intrusion Detection Using Automaton Inlining, Rajeev Gopalakrishna. Eugene H. Spafford. Jan Vitek, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2005.
SANS' frequently asked question page on intrusion detection contains and links to a lot of useful information, without trying to sell you on a particular product.
Slides:
Note: I have updated some of the slides in the Powerpoint presentations for lecture 12, but I have not retaped the lecture. The changes are minor and mostly represent updated statistics and examples. You should both view the videos and look over the slides in the presentations, however, to make sure you get the most up-to-date information. If anything about the differences in the slides from the videos is not clear, please ask me about it.
Lecture 12, Part 1. This powerpoint file covers both 12A and 12B.
Lecture 12, Part 2. This powerpoint file covers 12C.
There is no prolog for lecture 13.
Textbook: Chapter 10, sections 10.1-10.2 (pages 245-251)
Textbook: Chapter 11, sections 11.3-11.6 (pages 283-306)
Textbook: Chapter 26 (pages 773-799)
Web links:
RFC 2267: Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks Which Employ IP Source Address Spoofing, P. Ferguson and D. Senie, January 1998. One of two RFCs that define ingress filtering. The other one defines it in the opposite manner.
SYN Cookies, D. J. Bernstein. A good explanation of the details of SYN cookies to handle TCP SYN floods.
Slides:
Because of the midterm, which will be on Saturday, May 1, 1-3 PM, only one lecture is assigned this week.
The midterm examination is open book, open notes. It will consist of three essay questions on issues covered in lectures and readings. Everything discussed in the first nine lectures and all assigned readings (except those explicitly identified as not being tested) are possible materials for the test. Here is a sample midterm that is similar in style to the one you will be given.
The midterm will be held in Boelter Hall 5419, unless you have made previous arrangements for your exam to be proctored at another location.
Textbook: Chapter 18, pages 477-494.
Textbook: Chapter 21, pages 571-607.
Web links:
Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk, Seth Schoen, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
M. Corner and Brian Noble, Zero-Interaction Authentication, Mobicom 2002. An interesting use of a cryptographic file system for mobile computing.
Slides:
Textbook: Chapter 12 (pages 309-335)
Web links:
A discussion on choosing secure passwords.
A recent article arguing that much security advice given to users, including advice on passwords, is ignored for good reasons. This article has gotten wide attention, much of which does not really understand the author's points.
A short essay on the limits of using biometrics by Bruce Schneier. This essay is embedded in a longer newsletter. You need only read the section titled "Biometrics in Airports".
I. Dubrawsky, Cryptographic Filesystems, Part One: Design and Implementation,. A short web article describing basic approaches to cryptographic file systems and outlining the designs of a few well known examples.
J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, Edward W. Felten, Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys, Usenix Security Symposium, 2008. One of those papers that suddenly undermines a security assumption we'd all relied on. In this case, the assumption that RAM loses its data when power is turned off. It's particularly relevant to things like software full disk encryption, one of the technologies discussed in lecture 8.
Slides:
Textbook: Chapter 9, sections 9.2.2.2-9.7 (pages 227-241)
Textbook: Chapter 10, sections 10.3-10.9 (pages 252-272)
Web links:
Overview of Differential Power Analysis, Paul Kocher, Joshua Jaffe, and Benjamin Jun. A short overview of one type of side-band technique that can be used to break cryptography on a smart card.
Bruce Schneier's informal analysis of the meaning of the attack on SHA-1. You only need to read the article itself, not the lengthy sets of comments and responses that follow it. If you'd like to develop a deeper understanding of the issues involved in secure hashes related to collisions, the topic is discussed at length in these comments, but you aren't required to read them.
Slides:
This week's reading assignment is a bit longer than we will typically have.
Textbook: Introduction to Section IV and Chapter 9, sections 9.1-9.2.2.1 (pages 215-227), Chapter 11, sections 11.1-11.2 (pages 275-283).
Textbook: Chapter 4 (pages 95-120), Sections 5.1-5.2.2 (pages 123-132), Sections 6.1-6.2 (pages 151-155), Sections 7.1 (pages 169-177).
Textbook: Chapter 2 (pages 31-44) and Chapter 15 (pages 381-396).
Slides:
Textbook: Chapter 1 (pages 1-25)
Web links:
Improving the Security of Networked Systems, Julia Allen, Christopher Alberts, Sandi Behrens, Barbara Laswell, and William Wilson.
Why Computers Are Insecure, Bruce Schneier. (The link leads to an entire web page on various security subjects. Read it all, if you want, but the assignment is only this essay, which is around a page and a half.)
Social Engineering Fundamentals, Part I: Hacker Tactics Sarah Granger.
Slides:
There are no slides for the prolog to lecture 1.
Lecture 2, Prolog. While the stories in this prolog are no longer recent, the attitudes that made them possible are still common.