COMS W4187: Lectures

Sep 04

Introduction

Sep 06

Access control

Sep 11

Complex access control
Readings:

• Chapter 2 and 3 of Bishop (suggested)

Sep 13

Privileges

Sep 18

Introduction to Cryptography

Here is an error screen I saw on the Web recently. It's a treasure trove of security-related information.

Reading:

• Section 13.1 of Cheswick and Bellovin, Firewalls and Internet Security, first edition
• The Story of Alice and Bob
• Bishop, Chapter 8 and 9 (optional)
• New Directions in Cryptography, Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol IT-22, number 6, pp. 644--654, November 1976.
• British invention of non-secret encryption (recommended)
• A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems, R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman, Communications of the ACM, Volume 21 Issue 2, February 1978. (recommended)

Sep 20

Authentication
Readings:

• Password security: a case history. Robert Morris and Ken Thompson, Communications of the ACM, Volume 22, Issue 11 (November 1979), Pages: 594 - 597.
• Dr. Fun (recommended)

Sep 25

Biometrics; authentication as a systems problem
Reading:

• Chapter 5 of Who Goes There? Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy.

Sep 27

Case Study: Access control

Oct 02

Secure Programming I
Reading:

• The emperor's old clothes, Charles Antony Richard Hoare, February 1981, Communications of the ACM, Volume 24 Issue 2
• Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit, Aleph One, Phrack 49, Volume Seven, Issue Forty-Nine, File 14 of 16
• Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities, scut / team teso, March 17, 2001, Version 1.0
• StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks, Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, Dave Maier, Heather Hinton, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie, Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, and Qian Zhang. Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Security Symposium, January 1998, San Antonio, TX.
• Building Secure Software, John Viega and Gary McGraw, Addison-Wesley, 2002. (Recommended)
• Secure Coding in C and C++, Robert C. Seacord, Addison-Wesley, 2006. (Recommended)

Oct 04

Secure Programming II
Reading:

• Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep"), Paul Hoffman, RFC 3454, December 2002.
• Checking for Race Conditions in File Accesses, Matt Bishop and Michael Dilger, Computing Systems 9 (2) pp. 131-152 (Spring 1996).
• setuid - checklist for security of setuid programs
• Writing Safe SetUID Programs, Matt Bishop
• Using Attack Surface Area And Relative Attack Surface Quotient To Identify Attackability, Ernst & Young LLP.

Oct 09

Protecting the Client

• Microsoft Updating Without Permission: When No Doesn't Mean No!, Lauren Weinstein's Blog, September 13, 2007.
• Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge, Scott A. Craver, Min Wu, Bede Liu, Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan W. Wallach, Drew Dean, and Edward W. Felten. Proc. of 10th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2001.
• Viewpoint: the ACM declaration in Felten v. RIAA, Simons, B. 2001. Commun. ACM 44, 10 (Oct. 2001), 23-26.
• Java Card Security: How Smart Cards and Java Mix, From Securing Java: Getting Down to Business with Mobile Code, Gary McGraw and Ed Felten, John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
• MYK-78 CLIPPER CHIP: ENCRYPTION/DECRYPTION ON A CHIP (recommended)
• Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine, A. Appel and S. Govindavajhala. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2003 ( "Oakland Security Conference"). (recommended)
• Overview of Differential Power Analysis, An engineering overview of Differential Power Analysis by Paul Kocher, Joshua Jaffe, and Benjamin Jun. (recommended)
• Information Hiding: A Survey, Fabien A. P. Petitcolas, Ross J. Anderson and Markus G. Kuhn, Proceedings of the IEEE, special issue on protection of multimedia content, 87(7):1062{1078, July 1999. (recommended)

Oct 11

Cryptographic Engineering
Reading:

• The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG, Schneier on Security (blog), Nov. 15, 2007.
• Randomness Requirements for Security, RFC 4086, D. Eastlake, 3rd, J.Schiller, S. Crocker. June 2005.

Oct 16

Keys and Passwords

Oct 18

Review

Oct 23

Midterm

Grade histogram

Oct 25

Architecture
Reading:

• Security Tips, Apache 2.0 (recommended)
• suEXEC Support, Apache 2.0 (recommended)

Oct 30

Permissive Action Links, Nuclear Weapons, and the Prehistory of Public Key Cryptography
Reading:

• Chapter 11 of Anderson
• Permissive Action Links

Nov 01

Confinement
Reading:

• A domain and type enforcement UNIX prototype, Lee Badger, Daniel F. Sterne, David L. Sherman, and Kenneth M. Walker. USENIX Computing Systems, 9(1):47--83, Winter 1996. (recommended)
• A Secure Environment for Untrusted Helper Applications, Ian Goldberg, David Wagner, Randi Thomas and Eric A. Brewer, Proc. Usenix Security Symposium, 1996. (recommended)

Nov 06

Election Day — no class

Nov 08

Viruses and Trojan Horses
Reading:

• Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments, F. Cohen. DOD/NBS 7th Conference on Computer Security, originally appearing in IFIP-sec 84, also appearing as invited paper in IFIP-TC11, ``Computers and Security'', V6#1 (Jan. 1987), pp 22-35
• Reflections on trusting trust, Ken Thompson, CACM 27:8, August 1984.
• Viral Attacks On UNIX System Security, Tom Duff, August 1987.
• The worm programs -- early experience with a distributed computation, John Shoch and Jon Hupp, Communications of the ACM 25:3 (March 1982).
• Tool turns unsuspecting surfers into hacking help, CNET, March 20, 2007.
• JavaScript opens doors to browser-based attacks, CNET, July 28, 2006.

Readings mentioned in class:

• The Sony DRM Rootkit
• Problems with the Sony uninstaller
• The Sony license
• Trojan in open source FTP daemon
• Pentration of GNU archive
• The Internet Worm of 1988

Nov 13

Program Structure I
Please see the 4.3BSD FTP daemon source.

Nov 15

Program Structure II Reading:

• Steven M. Bellovin, "Virtual Machines, Virtual Security", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 49, No. 10, October 2006, Inside Risks.

Nov 20

Physical Security: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Guest lecturer: Mark Seiden)
Reading:

• US Navy Malware Infection Risked Submarine Prang
• Disgruntled Techie Attempts californian Power Blackout"
• Alleged Saboteur of Power Grid Gained Access Despite Warning
• Chocolate the Key to Uncovering PC Passwords

Nov 22

Thanksgiving — no class

Nov 27

Security Analysis I
Reading:

• The Art of Deception, Kevin Mitnick and William Simon, Wiley, 2002. (recommended) (Available as an EBook from the CU library)
• Silver Needle in the Skype, P. Biondi and F. Desclaux, BlackHat Europe, 2-3 March 2006.

Nov 29

Security Analysis II
Reading:

• ITS4: A Static Vulnerability Scanner for C and C++ Code, John Viega, J.T. Bloch, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Gary McGraw, Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2000.
• Checking for Race Conditions in File Accesses, M. Bishop and M. Dilger, Computing Systems 9:2, pp. 131-152 (Spring 1996)
• CGI/Perl Taint Mode FAQ
• Perl Advisor: Taint so Easy, Is It?, Randal L. Schwartz, Unix Review, August 2000.
• Static analysis and computer security: New techniques for software assurance. David Wagner. Ph.D. dissertation, Dec. 2000, University of California at Berkeley. (recommended)
• Using CQUAL for Static Analysis of Authorization Hook Placement, Xiaolan Zhang & Antony Edwards & Trent Jaeger, Proc. Usenix Security, 2002. (recommended)

Dec 04

Logging
Reading:

• Stalking the wily hacker, Communications of the ACM 31:5, May 1988.
• Shadow Hawk Busted Again, Phrack 16, File 11 (Nov 1987) (recommended)
• Chicago Phone Freak Gets Prison Term, Risks Digest 8:29, 22 February 1989 (recommended)

Dec 06

System Structure

Dec 20

Final exam, 1:10-4:00, Mudd 545