COMS W4187: Lectures

The lectures and readings listed here are subject to change, including in response to current events (i.e., major new security holes).

Sep 09: Introduction

Text, Chapter 1
Sep 14: Access control

Text, Chapter 2
Sep 16: Complex access control

Text, Chapter 3
Marking Classified National Security Information (optional)
Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (the document from which the sample marked page was taken; very optional)
Sep 21: Privileges

Text, Chapter 4
What is a Capability, Anyway?
Sep 23: Introduction to cryptography

Text, Chapter 7
The Story of Alice and Bob
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 28: Authentication

Text, Chapter 9
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
Dilbert
Dilbert
Dilbert
Dilbert
User Friendly
Sep 30: Biometrics; authentication as a systems problem

Chapter 5 of Who Goes There? Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy.
CS Department certificate
CUIT mail server certificate
Oct 05: Case Study: Access control
Oct 07: Secure Programming I

Text, Chapter 6
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
Static Analysis for Security, Gary McGraw, IEEE Security & Privacy (Nov/Dec 2004).
Oct 12: Secure Programming II

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 14: Protecting the client

Text, Chapter 13
Fare Collection Vulnerability Assessment Report, Zack Anderson, Russell Ryan, Alessandro Chiesa, August 8, 2008.
Anatomy of a Subway Hack, Zack Anderson, Russell Ryan, Alessandro Chiesa, (censored) DEFCON presentation, August 2008.
Dutch Public Transit Card Broken, Andy Tanenbaum.
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)
The Risk of ePassports and RFID, THC Blog, Sep 29, 2008. (recommended)
Oct 19: Keys and Passwords
Oct 21: Midterm
Oct 26: Cryptographic Engineering

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 28: Security and Usability

A. Adams and M. A. Sasse, 1999. "Users are not the enemy: why users compromise security mechanisms and how to take remedial measures". Communications of the ACM 42(12), 40-46.
Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar, "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Case Study of PGP 5.0". Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium, August 1999.
Lorrie Faith Cranor, "A Framework for Reasoning About the Human in the Loop". Usability Psychology and Security Workshop, 2008.
Nov 04: Architecture

Security Tips, Apache 2.2 (recommended)
suEXEC Support, Apache 2.2 (recommended)
Nov 09: Confinement

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 11: Viruses and Trojan Horses

Recreating the Trojan Horse?
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).
With Microscope and Tweezers: An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988
Come Sunday, it will be 20 years ago that day a worm came out to play
Tool turns unsuspecting surfers into hacking help, CNET, March 20, 2007.
JavaScript opens doors to browser-based attacks, CNET, July 28, 2006.
Oldest known depiction of the Trojan Horse, from the "Vase of Mykonos", almost 2700 years old

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
Nov 16: Program Structure I

The 4.3BSD FTP daemon source.
Nov 18: Program Structure II

Steven M. Bellovin, "Virtual Machines, Virtual Security", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 49, No. 10, October 2006, Inside Risks.
Nov 23: Physical and Procedural Security

M. Blaze. "Cryptology and Physical Security: Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks." March 2003. IEEE Security and Privacy. March/April 2003.
M. Blaze. "Safecracking for the Computer Scientist." U. Penn CIS Department Technical Report. 7 December 2004 (revised 20 December 2004).
Physical Security Standards for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities. DCID 6/9, 18 November 2002.
The Art of Deception, Kevin Mitnick and William Simon, Wiley, 2002. (recommended) (Available as an EBook from the CU library)
US Navy Malware Infection Risked Submarine Prang
Disgruntled Techie Attempts Californian Power Blackout"
Chocolate the Key to Uncovering PC Passwords
Nov 25: Permissive Action Links, Nuclear Weapons, and the Prehistory of Public Key Cryptography

Chapter 11 of Anderson's Security Engineering.
Permissive Action Links
Nov 30: Security Analysis I

Silver Needle in the Skype, P. Biondi and F. Desclaux, BlackHat Europe, 2-3 March 2006.
Dec 02: Security Analysis II

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 07: Logging

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 09: After an Attack

"The Taking of Clark", Chapter 17, Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, William R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, and Aviel D. Rubin, Second Edtion, Addison-Wesley, 2003.
"File System Analysis", Chapter 4, Forensic Discovery, Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema, Addison-Wesley 2004. Read Chapter 4.
Playing "Hide and Seek" with Stored Keys, Adi Shamir and Nicko van Someren, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Financial Cryptography, 1999. (Recommended)
Dec 14: System Structure
Dec 21: Final

COMS W4187 — Lectures (Fall '09)