CS 577 Cybersecurity Lab

Overview

Attacks on computer systems have become part of everyday life. It is the goal of this class to teach a thorough understanding of the possible security failures, as well as the protection mechanism. The class will cover network and host security concepts and mechanisms; basic cryptographic algorithms and protocols; authentication and authorization protocols; access control models; common network (wired and wireless) attacks; typical protection approaches, including firewalls and intrusion detection systems; and operating systems and application vulnerabilities, exploits, and countermeasures; distributed denial of service attacks and botnets. The class will not only cover the subjects in theory but instead also provide the students with an extensive hands-on experience. The class will involve a fair amount of programming. Those who take the class are expected to be able to program in C/C++, have some basic knowledge of assembly language, and be familiar with network basics and programming, as well as Unix-like operating systems.

Prerequisites

The course requires good programming skills (C, C++), including some knowledge of x86 assembly. Also, a basic background in operating systems (mainly UNIX) and networking.

Course prereqs:

• CS 506 Introduction to IT Security
• CS 576 (co-requisite)
• CS 590 Algorithms (for grads) or CS 385 Algorithms (undergrads) or CS 182 Introduction to Computer Science Honors II (undergrads)

If you feel that you possess the skills to follow this course but have not taken the prerequisite courses, contact me to establish whether I can waive the requirements for the course.

Tools

Projects

Grading

Week-by-week schedule

Subjects covered in lectures are tentative and may change (last update 8/25/14). Refer to moodle for up-to-date information.

Week	Subjects	Readings	Files
1.8/28/14	Course logistics. Setup.	Chapters 1, 19, 14, 15, 17.
2.9/4/14	Basic crypto. Message authentication. Hashing. Random number generation. Submit ideas for project.	Chapters 2, 20, 21. Optional: Not-So-Random Numbers in Virtualized Linux and the Whirlwind RNG	Lab-01
3.9/11/14	Authentication. Access control, authorization. PKI. Biometrics.	Chapters 3, 4, 23. Optional: SAuth: Protecting User Accounts from Password Database Leaks	Lab-02
4.9/18/14	Buffer overflows. Format string attacks. Code injection. Return-to-libc attacks. Submit project proposals.	Chapters 10, 11. Smashing the stack for fun and profit w00w00 on heap overflows Advances in format string exploitation Advanced return-into-lib(c) exploits	Lab-03
5.9/25/14	Heap-spraying. Return-oriented programming.	Heap Spraying: Attackers' Latest Weapon Of Choice The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone: Return-into-libc without Function Calls Optional: On the effectiveness of address-space randomization ASLR Smack & Laugh Reference	Lab-04
6.10/2/14	Software defenses. Fix what was broken in weeks 4 and 5.	PaX ASLR StackGuard Cling: A Memory Allocator to Mitigate Dangling Pointers
7.10/9/14	SQL injection. Cross-site scripting (XSS). Cross-site request forgery (CSRF).	Chapter 5.	Lab-05
8.10/16/14	Midterm project presentation/project report due.
9.10/23/13	Mobile security.	Flexible and Fine-Grained Mandatory Access Control on Android for Diverse Security and Privacy Policies Securing Embedded User Interfaces: Android and Beyond Jekyll on iOS: When Benign Apps Become Evil Mobile Malware Detection Based on Energy Fingerprints — A Dead End?	Lab-06
10.10/30/14	Malware. Sandboxing. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.	Chapters 6, 7. Revolver: An Automated Approach to the Detection of Evasive Web-based Malware Practical and Effective Sandboxing for Non-root Users SOS: An Architecture For Mitigating DDoS Attacks Exit from Hell? Reducing the Impact of Amplification DDoS Attacks	Lab-07
11.11/6/14	Firewalls. Network intrusion detection. Honeypots.	Chapters 8, 9. Snort - Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Networks A Virtual Honeypot Framework SweetBait: Zero-hour worm detection and containment using low- and high-interaction honeypots Data Mining Approaches for Intrusion Detection	Lab-08
12.11/13/14	Information flow. Taint analysis.	Chapter 13. Raksha: A Flexible Information Flow Architecture for Software Security Minos: Control Data Attack Prevention Orthogonal to Memory Model Argos: an Emulator for Fingerprinting Zero-Day Attacks Taint-Exchange: a Generic System for Cross-process and Cross-host Taint Tracking
13.11/20/14	Null-pointer dereferences. Code integrity.	kGuard: Lightweight Kernel Protection against Return-to-user Attacks SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes	Sandboxing - libseccomp lab will be given in class
11/27/14	No class. Thanks giving break.
14.12/4/14	Final project presentations.
15.12/11/14 (tentative)	Final project reports due.