Naval Postgraduate School Summer 2014

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

Syllabus

Contact Information

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

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-book quizzes consisting of 20 questions drawn from the readings. The first quiz draws from the first half of the papers, while the second quiz 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:

In-class discussion: 40% Online discussion: 40% Quiz #1: 10% Quiz #2: 10%

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 of July 7: System Security

Saltzer and Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems, ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (October 1973) HTML HTML2
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

Week of 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

Week of July 21: Encryption

Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, New Directions in Cryptography, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, November 1976
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
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.)

Week of July 28: Attacking Encryption

Davis, Don. Defective Sign & Encrypt in S/MIME, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP, and XML USENIX Security 2001 HTML
Anderson, Ross. Why Cryptosystems Fail
Optional: Bernstein, D. J. Cache-timing attacks on AES, 2004
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: Brumley, D. and Boneh, D. Remote timing attacks are practical. Computer Networks 48, 5 (2005), 701-716
Optional: Brumley, B. B., and Tuveri, N. Remote timing attacks are still practical, In Computer Security-ESORICS 2011, Spring 2011, pp. 355-371
Optional: Anderson and Needham, [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/satan.pdf Programming Satan's computer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 1000, 1995, pp 426-440

Week of 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.
Dingledine and Mathewson, Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) 2006
Optional: Syverson, Paul A Peel of Onion, ACSAC 2011

Week of August 11: Usability

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
Garfinkel, Simson and Shelat, Abhi, Remembrance of Data Passed, IEEE Security and Privacy, Volume 1 Issue 1, January 2003, Page 17-27

Week of August 18: Software Security

Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust,, Communications of the ACM, 27:8, Aug 1984
Miller, Fredriksen, and So., An Empirical Study of the Reliability of Unix Utilities, Comm. of the ACM, 1990
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: 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: 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 of 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 of 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 of 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
Optional: Hsu, D-Wave's Year of Computing Dangerously, Spectrum, IEEE , Volume 50, Issue 12, December 2013, 11 - 13

Papers that didn't make the cut

Quantum Cryptography

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 - Section on Quantum Cryptography

Network

Detecting prefix hijackings in the internet with argus

PKI

Ellison, Ten Risks of PKI: What You're not Being iTold about Public Key Infrastructure
Davis, Compliance Defects in Public-Key * Cryptography
Davis, Defective Sign & Encrypt in S/Mime, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP, and XML
Denning, The Future of Cryptography
Abelson, The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption

Aggregation and Inference

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

Mobile Hardware Vulnerabilities

Chan, An Overview of Smart Card Security
Skorobogatov, Optical Fault Induction Attacks
Samyde, On a New Way to Read Data from Memory

Physics Principles and Computer Systems

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

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)

NPS CS4614 Summer 2014