NPS CS4614 Summer 2014

Naval Postgraduate School Summer 2014

CS4614: Advanced Topics in Computer Security (3-1) Faculty: Garfinkel

Syllabus

Contact Information

Course CLE:	Sakai
Piazza:	https://piazza.com/nps/summer2014/cs4614/home
Course Location:	Google Hangouts (or VTC)
Instructor:	Simson L. Garfinkel, Ph.D.
Phone:	202-649-0029
Internet e-mail:	slgarfin
Website:	http://www.simson.net
Informal TA	Alan B.

Course Information

Course Goal

This course teaches students the seminal computer security papers of the past four decades. We use these papers to build graduate level knowledge and reasoning skills. We do this through reading and discussing the papers, both verbally and in writing. This pedagogical approach is constructivist, in that it encourages the students to develop their own viewpoints and conclusions.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Read and understand an academic research paper on computer security.
• Find the salient points of an academic research paper.
• Present aspects of a security paper to your peers.
• Find related papers.

Course Format

The course format is a reading and discussion seminar. Each week explores a central concept in computer security with three papers. The first class each week will be devoted to class management and previewing the week's papers. The second class will be a deep-dive on the papers. For the third class students will find follow-up papers, prepare discussions, and present those papers in class.

The course will have two open tests consisting of 20 questions drawn from the readings. The first test draws from the first half of the papers, while the second test draws from the second half.

Prerequisites

We assume that students are familiar with current best practices for administration and configuration of commercial products for the day-to-day processing of information. Particular emphasis is placed on research regarding the protection of high value data, the foundations of high assurance policy enforcement, and the uses of multilevel security.

Students must have graduate level abilities to research, organize and evaluate technical problems, and to participate in related discussions (e.g., speaking, explaining, querying, and active listening).

Assessment

Grades are calculated as follows:

Class participation: 40% (2-paragraph assignments and comments on other students)

Quiz #1: 30%

Quiz #2: 30%

When you write your 2-paragraph assignments, try to answer the "Five Reading Questions" that you have seen in other NPS courses:

0. What concern or question do you bring to the reading?
1. What are the author's main claims?
2. What grounding does the author offer for the claims?
3. What is the author's main motivation for doing this work?
4. What actions does the author recommend?
5. What opened or closed for you in this reading?

The purpose of the questions is to locate the author in the much larger network of human conversations. What is that author saying? Do you accept the claims? Why? Who influenced the author? What "school of thought" does the author belong to? Who did the author subsequently influence? Did the author settle any questions for you? Open new questions that you will pursue in the future?

The quizzes will be take-home quizzes administered via Sakai. There will one multiple-choice and one free-response question for each of the mandatory papers that we discussed. I will be drafting these quizzes as we read the papers.

Protocols

Communication is a central part of every course. This section of the syllabus describes what we expect from your communications with your fellow students and the course staff.

Notifications

For announcements and assignments, the course Piazza collaboration site is our authoritative form of communication. Students are expected to either check the Piazza website at least three times a week or sign up for e-mail alerts. If you miss an announcement, it should be on the Piazza site.

Homework

All homework is due on Friday of each week for the week that it is assigned. Late homework is not accepted except in extraordinary cases. It is our intent to have graded homework back to you by the following monday.

Class Participation

This is a seminar-style class. As such, class participation on the website is an important part of the experience.

Students will be given a "first half" class participation grade following the midterm examination, giving students a "heads up" on how they are doing while there is still an opportunity to make substantive improvements.

General protocols for Email and Discussion Forums

Although email and discussion forums may feel like talking, it's important to remember that they are written communication. You may feel the need to quickly respond to a message, but many minutes, hours, or even days may elapse between the time that you write something and the time it will be read. Therefore:

• Before you send or post a message, take the time to read it through from beginning to end.

• Please be sure to check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Avoid sending large blocks of text.

• In general, avoid writing messages in UPPERCASE, as this makes your message hard to read and is impolite in modern electronic communications.

Discussion Forum Protocols

• Participation is required. We will monitor both how many new threads you start and how often you respond to threads started by others. Both are required for full credit.

• All online discussion must be civil. Feel free to dissect the idea presented by someone else, but do not attack the person.

• Try to be concise in your messages.

• Do not quote extensively from the works of others; post links instead.

• If you do post a link, please write a few sentences that summarize it and present your opinion about the work. Do not simply post links; this does not count as participation in a discussion.

• Remember, there are multiple copies made of everything that is posted in the discussion forum. There are copies on backup tapes, copies on every computer that accesses the forum, and potentially copies sent by email as well. Even though the intend the forum to be a "safe" space for academic discussions, remember that anything you write might well come back to haunt you.

Communication with Course Staff

• All email directed to the course staff should be sent to the professor.

• Email should only be used for personal matters; if you have a question about the content of the course that others would benefit from, please post it to the discussion forum.

• Homework should not be submitted by email unless specifically requested by the course staff for a particular assignment.

• Please obtain prior approval before sending email messages with attachments larger than 2MB.

• We will strive to answer most mail within 24 hours; if you do not have a response within 48 hours, please resend your message.

Office Hours

Professor Garfinkel maintains regular office hours and is available at other times by appointment.

Schedule

• July 7, 2014 --- Instruction Begins
• Sept 1, 2014 --- Labor Day (no classes)
• Sept 16, 2014 --- Last Day of Classes
• Sept 18-19,2014 --- Final Exam

Week 1 (July 7): System Security

• Saltzer and Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems, ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (October 1973) HTML HTML2 Note: Read at least the first 8 pages
• Richard E. Smith, A Contemporary Look at Saltzer and Schroeder's 1975 Design Principles, IEEE Security and Privacy, Nov-Dec 2012.
• Optional: Karger and Schell, Thirty Years later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation, ACSAC 2002
• Optional: Lipner, Jaeger and Zurko, Lessons from VAX/SVS for High-Assurance VM Systems, IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, Nov-Dec 2012
• Optional: Lamport, Butler. A Note on the Confinement Problem, Communications of the ACM, 16:10 (Oct. 1973), pp.613-615. PDF
• Optional: Bishop, Matt, Reflections on UNIX Vulnerabilities, ACSAC 2009

References (don't read)

• Multics security evaluation Volume 1 Volume 2

Week 2 (July 14): Passwords

• Morris, Robert and Thompson, Ken. Password security: a case history, Communications of the ACM CACM Homepage archive Volume 22 Issue 11, Nov. 1979 Pages 594-597. PDF
• Mazurek et al, Measuring password guessability for an entire university, CCS '13 Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security, Pages 173-186
• Optional: Greg Conti and James Caroland, Embracing the Kobayashi Maru, IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, July-August 2011
• Optional:' An Administrator's Guide to Internet Password Research, by Florencio, Herley and Oorschot.

Week 3 (July 21): Encryption and PKI

• Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, New Directions in Cryptography, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, November 1976
• Ellison, Ten Risks of PKI: What You're not Being Told about Public Key Infrastructure, Computer Security Journal, Volume XCI, Number 1, 2000
• Durumeric et al, Analysis of the HTTPS certificate Ecosystem, IMC 2013

Optional current stuff

• Optional: Sascha Fahl, Yasemin Acar, Henning Perl, and Matthew Smith. 2014. Why eve and mallory (also) love webmasters: a study on the root causes of SSL misconfigurations. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM symposium on Information, computer and communications security (ASIA CCS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 507-512. DOI=10.1145/2590296.2590341 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2590296.2590341

• optional: Holz et al, The SSL landscape: a thorough analysis of the x.509 PKI using active and passive measurements, Internet Measuring Conference 2011
• optional: What is Certificate Transparency?
• optional: EFF SSL Observatory?
• optional: Gutmann, PKI in the real world, NSPW 2006

optional historical stuff

• optional: Merkle, R. Security, Authentication, and Public Key Systems, PhD Thesis, 1979 Stanford University. (Just read chapter 2, pages 11-15, in which Merkle invents cryptographic hash functions.)
• optional: Andrew Zangrilli, 30 Years of Public-Key Cryptography (blog entry), 2012
• optional: R. L. Rivest and A. Shamir and L. M. Adelman, A Method For Obtaining Digital Signatures And Public-Key Cryptosystems, MIT/LCS/TM-82, 1977
• optional: Denning, Dorothy. The Future of Cryptography, 1996 PrivLawPRpr 26; (1996) 3(2) Privacy Law & Policy Reporter 33
• optional: Abelson Et Al, The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption, May 1997 PDF

Week 4 (July 28): Attacking Encryption

• Anderson, Ross. Why Cryptosystems Fail, Communications of the ACM, November 1994. ACM DL
• Brumley, D. and Boneh, D. Remote timing attacks are practical. Computer Networks 48, 5 (2005), 701-716
• Halderman et al, Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys, USENIX Security 2008.

• Optional: Murdoch, Drimer, Anderson and Bond's, Chip and PIN is Broken, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
• Optional: Analysing Android's Full Disk Encryption Feature, Götzfried and Müller, Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitious Computing and Dependable Applications, Volume 5, Number 1, pp. 84-100.
• Optional: Anderson and Needham, Programming Satan's computer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 1000, 1995, pp 426-440
• Optional: Bernstein, D. J. Cache-timing attacks on AES, 2004
• Optional: Brumley, B. B., and Tuveri, N. Remote timing attacks are still practical, In Computer Security-ESORICS 2011, Spring 2011, pp. 355-371
• Optional: White et al, Phonotactic Reconstruction of Encrypted VoIP Conversations: Hookt on Fon-iks, SP '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Pages 3-18
• Optional: Compliance defects in public-key cryptography, Don Davis, SSYM'96 Proceedings of the 6th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, Focusing on Applications of Cryptography - Volume 6, Pages 17-17 PDF
• Optional: Davis, Don. Defective Sign & Encrypt in S/MIME, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP, and XML USENIX Security 2001 HTML

Week 5 (August 4): Mixnets and Tor

• David Chaum. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 4(2):84–88, February 1981.
• Tor: the second-generation onion router, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, USENIX Security 2004
• Syverson, Paul A Peel of Onion, ACSAC 2011

Note: Professor Garfinkel will be at the DFRWS Conference this week. There will be no FRIDAY class. Please take the quiz instead.

Save this for next week:

• Dingledine and Mathewson, Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) 2006

Week 6 (August 11): Usability

Students interested in usability are invited to read Professor Garfinkel's usability literature review at http://simson.net/work/hcisec-review.pdf

In week 6 we will be reading:

• Whitten, Alma, Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0, Proceedings of the 8th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, Volume 8, Pages 14-28
• Dingledine and Mathewson, Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) 2006
• Norcie, et al, Why Johnny Can’t Blow the Whistle: Identifying and Reducing Usability Issues in Anonymity Systems, USEC '14, 23 February 2014, San Diego, CA

• optional: S. Sheng, B. Magnien, P. Kumaraguru, A. Acquisti, L. Cranor, J. Hong, and E. Nunge. Anti-Phishing Phil: The Design and Evaluation of a Game That Teaches People Not to Fall for Phish. In Proceedings of the 2007 Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security, Pittsburgh, PA, July 18-20, 2007.
• optional: "Little Brothers Watching You:" Raising Awareness of Data Leaks on Smartphones Rebecca Balebako (Carnegie Mellon University), Jaeyeon Jung (Microsoft Research), Wei Lu (Microsoft), Lorrie Cranor (Carnegie Mellon University), and Carolyn Nguyen (Microsoft)
• optional: Out of the Loop: How Automated Software Updates Cause Unintended Security Consequences, SOUPS 2014, Rick Wash, Emilee Rader, Kami Vaniea, Michelle Rizor (Michigan State University)
• optional: Garfinkel, Simson and Shelat, Abhi, Remembrance of Data Passed, IEEE Security and Privacy, Volume 1 Issue 1, January 2003, Page 17-27

Week 7 (August 18): Software Security

• Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Communications of the ACM, 27:8, Aug 1984 (short)
• Miller, Fredriksen, and So., An Empirical Study of the Reliability of Unix Utilities, Comm. of the ACM, 1990
• Billions and billions of constraints: whitebox fuzz testing in production, Ella Bounimova, Patrice Godefroid, David Molnar, ICSE '13 Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
• Fuzzing with Code Fragments, Holler, Herzig and Seller, Usenix Security 2012

• optional: J.E. Forrester and B.P. Miller, An Empirical Study of the Robustness of Windows NT Applications Using Random Testing, 4th USENIX Windows Systems Symposium, Seattle, August 2000.
• optional: An empirical study of the robustness of MacOS applications using random testing, Barton P. Miller, Gregory Cooksey, Fredrick Moore, January 2007, SIGOPS Operating Systems Review , Volume 41 Issue 1* Optional: Godefroid, Levin and Molnar, [Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/atg/ndss2008.pdf], NDSS 2008.
• Optional: Denning, D. A Lattice Model of Secure Information Flow, Communications of the ACM, Volume 19 Issue 5, May 1976, Pages 236-243

See also

• Optional: B.P. Miller, D. Koski, C.P. Lee, V. Maganty, R. Murthy, A. Natarajan, and J. Steidl, Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities and Services, Computer Sciences Technical Report #1268, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 1995.
• Optional: Anderson, J. P., Computer Security Technology Planning Study, ESD-TR-73-51, ESD/AFSC, Hanscom AFB, Bedford, MA (Oct. 1972) [NTIS AD-758 206]; [Volume 1] [Volume 2]
• Optional: James P. Anderson, Multilevel Security - The Neglected Area of Computer Science (April 17, 1997) [VIDEO]
• Optional: In Memoriam James P. Anderson, An Information Security Pioneer, IEEE Security and Privacy, 2007

Week 8 (August 25): Hardware Security

• Brocker, Matthew; Checkoway, Stephen, iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED
• Karl Koscher et al, Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2010
• Stephen Checkoway et al, Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces, USENIX Security Sympsium, August 2011.

Week 9 (September 1): Electronic Voting

• David Evans and Nathanael Paul, Election Security: Perception and Reality, IEEE Security and Privacy, January-February 2004.
• Kohno et al, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2004. IEEE Computer Society Press, May 2004
• Optional:' Trusted Agent Report Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System, RABA Innovative Solution Cell (RiSC), Dr. Michael A. Wertheimer, Director
• Optional: Lamone, Response to: Department of Legislative Services Trusted Agent Report on Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System, July 22, 2004

Week 10 (September 8): Quantum Cryptography and Computing

• Dave Bacon and Debbie Leung. Toward a World with Quantum Computers, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 50, No. 7, September 2007.
• Scott Aaronson The Limits of Quantum Computers, Scientific American, 2008
• Hsu, D-Wave's Year of Computing Dangerously, Spectrum, IEEE , Volume 50, Issue 12, December 2013, 11 - 13

Week 11 (September 15): The Future

We will discuss the papers of the entire summer and put them into context

Please consider reading this paper:

• Bishop, Matt, Computer Security in the Future, ISC International Journal of Information Security, January 2011, Volume 3, Number 1 (pp. 3-27)

Papers that didn't make the cut

Quantum Cryptography

• Thermodynamics and garbage collection, Henry G. Baker, ACM SIGPLAN Volume 29 Issue 4, April 1994 , Pages 58 - 63
• Choas, Complexity, and Entropy, a physics talk for non-physicists, Michael Baranger.
• Choas, Complexity, and the Military, John Gore, Master's Thesis, National Defense University / National War College, 1996
• Quantum Universe, the revolution in 21st Century Particle Physics, DOE/NSF High Energy Physics Advisory Panel
• The Dinosaur and the Butterfly: A Tale of Computer Ethics, IEEE Security and Privacy, 2003
• Wikipedia, Quantum Cryptography, Section 1.2, attacks.
• Paterson, Why Quantum Cryptography?
• Singh The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, To Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography, Chapter 8, A Quantum Leap into the Future
• An introduction to quantum cryptography, Nick Papanikolaou, Crossroads, Volume 11 Issue 3, March 2005 , Pages 3
• WHy Quantum Cryptography?, Kenneth Paterson and Fred Piper (unpublished?), 2004
• Quantum cryptography in practice, Chip Elliott, David Pearson, Gregory Troxel, Proceeding SIGCOMM '03 Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, Pages 227-238

Network

• Detecting prefix hijackings in the internet with argus

Information Warfare

• Subversion as a Threat in Information Warfare, Cynthia Irvine And , Emory A. Anderson , Cynthia E. Irvine , Roger R. Schell, Journal of Information Warfare, 2004

• Lunt, Aggregation and Inference: Facts and Fallacies
• Denning, A dialogue on Aggregation Problems

Common Criteria

• Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (specific readings will be identified)
• Julian, Turning Security on Its Head

Secure Systems

• Schell, Information Security: Science, Pseudoscience, and Flying Pigs
• Denning, The Limits of Formal Security Models
• Building Trust into a Multi-Level File System, Cynthia E. Irvine, Todd B. Acheson, and Michael Thompson, Gemini Computers

• Security Kernel Design and Implementation: An Introduction, Ames, S.R., Jr. ; The Mitre Corporation ; Gasser, M. ; Schell, R.R., 1983
• Designing the Gemsos security kernel for security and performance, Schell and Tao, Gemini Computers, 1985.

Mobile Hardware Vulnerabilities

• Chan, An Overview of Smart Card Security
• On a New Way to Read Data From Memory, Samyde, Skorobagatov, Anderson, and Quisquater, 2002
• Optical Fault Induction Attacks, Skorobogatov, 2002
• Samyde, On a New Way to Read Data from Memory

Physics Principles and Computer Systems

• Chaos, Complexity and Entropy: A physics talk for non-physicists, Baranger,

Books

• Gasser's Building a Secure Computer System (old, but also available online for free!),
• Kaufman, Perlman and Speciner Network Security (perhaps aging too, but the humor always has me rolling on the floor, and so insightful),
• Anderson Security Engineering (which I've never read all the way through; I keep trying to find an excuse to)

See Also

• NIST Computer Security Division Computer Security Research Center early computer security papers
• Seminal Computer Security Papers, Matt Bishop, UC Davis