The objective of this course is to provide you with an understanding of principles and practice of security in modern computing systems . An additional objective is to provide you with “hands-on” skills needed for addressing threats to security and privacy of information that is handled by computer systems.

Note: This course is being offered for the first time, and hence is offered under the generic template title “Seminar”. It is NOT a seminar course. It is a full fledged regular course that you can get credit for!

A tentative list of topics covered is as follows:

  1. Introduction to security
    • Host system security
    • Network security
    • Cryptography
  2. Developing secure software
    • Buffer overflows
    • Secure coding practices
  3. Protection of host systems
    • Strengthening existing systems
    • Malicious code protection
    • Sandboxing
    • Host based Intrusion Detection
  4. Protection of networked systems
    • TCP Attacks
    • Connection Hijacking
    • Port Scanning/ OS Fingerprinting
    • Network IDS
    • Authentication in a networked environment
    • Denial of Service/ Distributed denial-of service attacks