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Network Security

For general information about the course, please visit the School's page of the module. It contains the official information about learning outcomes, restrictions, prerequisites, and co-requisites, and assessment.

Description

Our daily lives are growing more dependent on an efficient, reliable and secure network infrastructure and network systems. Unfortunately, such systems are too often vulnerable (by design or due to implementation errors) and are frequent targets of attacks.

This course focuses on how to analyze the security of a networked system (which we broadly intend here to cover areas such as network protocols, web applications, etc.). Therefore, the course will present approaches and techniques to design secure systems, evaluate the security of existing ones, and detect attacks against them.

This course combines a practical, hands-on approach with the discussion of seminal and/or current research work in the area. It will present in detail real vulnerabilities, techniques that are used to exploit them, and mechanism to defend against such exploits.

Ethical issues will also be discussed.

Instructor

Marco Cova
Computer Science building, Room 235

Class schedule

Mondays, 3pm-4pm, LG33, Learning Centre
Wednesdays, 10am-11am, LT3, Sport & Exercise Science

Office hours

Wednesdays, 11am-1pm, and by appointment

Demonstrator

Ian Batten
Office hours: Thursdays 2pm, Room 245 February: Thursdays 1pm, Room 245
March: Thursdays 1pm, Room 222

Lectures

LectureReadingsMaterial
Lecture 1: Introduction (none) slides, handout
Lecture 2: PGP + TCP/IP (IP, Ethernet, ARP) (none) slides, handout
Lecture 3: TCP/IP (Sniffing, ARP attacks) (none) slides, handout
Lecture 4: TCP/IP (libnet+libpcap, IP routing) (none) slides, handout, code
Lecture 5: TCP/IP (ICMP, UDP) S. Bellovin, Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite slides, handout
Lecture 6: TCP/IP (TCP) (none) slides, handout
Lecture 7: more TCP (none) slides, handout
Lecture 8: DNS and TCP/IP recap D. Dagon, M. Antonakakis, X. Luo, C. P. Lee, W. Lee, K. Day, Recursive DNS Architectures and Vulnerability Implications slides, handout
Lecture 9: WebAppSec: SQL injection J. Bau, E. Bursztein, D. Gupta, J. Mitchell, State of the Art: Automated Black-Box Web Application Vulnerability Testing slides, handout
Lecture 10: WebAppSec: SQLi, XSS, CSRF (none) slides, handout, code
Lecture 11: WebAppSec: more attacks (none) slides, handout, screencast
Lecture 12: Drive-by-download attacks and phishing C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, K. Levchenko, B. Enright, G. Voelker, V. Paxson, S. Savage, Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion slides, handout, screencast
Lecture 13: Botnets + underground economy B. Stone-Gross, M. Cova, L. Cavallaro, B. Gilbert, M. Szydlowski, R. Kemmerer, C. Kruegel, G. Vigna, Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover slides, handout, screencast
Lecture 14: Mark Ryan — Electronic Voting I (Guest lecture) (none)
Lecture 15: Mark Ryan — Electronic Voting II (Guest lecture) (none)
Lecture 16: Tom Chothia (Guest lecture) (none)
Lecture 17: Browser security C. Jackson, A. Barth, A. Bortz, W. Shao, D. Boneh, Protecting Browsers from DNS Rebinding Attacks slides, handout, screencast
Lecture 18: Worms S. Staniford, V. Paxson, N. Weaver, How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time (Optional) slides, handout, screencast
Lecture 19: invited lecture: Paul Baccas, Sophos (none)
Lecture 20: intrusion detection systems slides, handout
Lecture 21: Module recap and Q/A (none) slides, handout, code
Lecture 22: Revision lecture I (none) slides, handout
Lecture 23: Revision lecture II (none) slides, handout

Read the reading material (if any) before coming to class.

Note: the schedule is only indicative and may change as we progress.

Homework assignments

See the marks for the homework assignments graded so far.

Additional material

Here is a list of additional material that may be useful to better understand some parts of the course. Feel free to contribute any material that you found useful (just send me an email)!