Course syllabus
Table of contents
The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts.
Course description
This course serves as an introduction to the basic concepts of network security with an emphasis on practical and development skills. Topics include denial of service attacks and defenses, authentication, key distribution, message authentication, access control, protocol security, virtual private networks, and security standards. The course will provide a review of basic network design, the end-to-end principle, and basic cryptography. Prerequisites: CSSE 132 or approval of the instructor.
Learning objectives
At the end of this class, you should be able to:
- Identify security vulnerabilities in network protocols and exploit them in a controlled environment.
- Actively engage in the design and protection of network components.
- Work in a team to produce a laboratory assignment that can be used by future students in the class, on a topic of your choice.
- Practice relaying learned concepts to other students by presenting your lab results in the classroom.
Course delivery
This class will mostly be delivered via practical laboratory assignments that you will be doing during and outside of class time. Therefore, class meeting times will include a short lecture, a demo, and then time for you to work on your labs and ask questions as you go on.
While doing the labs, you will answer a series of guided questions that will allow you to finally define basic networking and security concepts, and then stitch them together to form a coherent lecture.
Paper discussion
In addition to lab quizzes/reports, you will be asked to read research papers and comment on them with your thoughts/impressions based on your observations in the labs. We will do this using the Perusall tool where we can collaboratively read and comment on research papers.
Project
As part of the class, you will work with a group of classmates to design a network security laboratory assignment. You are expected to design experiments that can be used by your peers in the classroom to work through a security concept and learn about it as they do the lab.
[Tentative] Final exam
At the end of the quarter, depending on how many students are still registered, you might be tasked with infiltrating an already established network. You will be given an entry point into the network, along with a set of possible software vulnerabilities. Your job would be to map out the network, hop through it, reach a target server, and obtain a secret key from it.
Naturally, this would be more of a fun and informative exercise, and since it is as of yet still tentative, it will share a small fraction of your final grade.
Textbook
There is no required textbook for this class, I have found that eventually I end up creating content for class that is based on an amalgamation of content from textbooks, papers, YouTube videos, blog posts, and so on. I will try as much as possible to make the course self-contained when it comes to the material that are publicly available.
Recommended textbook
However, there must be a resource that shines away from the competition; in this case, it is “Internet Security: A Hands-on Approach” by Wenliang Du. This is a great textbook that covers most of what we will go through in this class in a way that covers both theory and practice, so I recommend that you purchase a copy of this book and keep it with you for later-on reference in your career.
Du, Wenliang, “Internet Security: A Hands-on Approach” 2nd Edition, 2019
If you’d like to check out the book, I have an extra copy in my office that I would be happy to lend you to read in the CS labs.
Supplemental textbook(s)
In addition to the above textbook, I used the following list of references to design the course material:
- Zave, Pamela, and Jennifer Rexford. “Patterns and Interactions in Network Security.” ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 53.6 (2020): 1-37.
- Perlman, Radia, Charlie Kaufman, and Mike Speciner. Network security: private communication in a public world. Pearson Education, 2002.
- Stallings, William. Network Security Essentials: Applications and Standards, 6/e. Pearson Education, 2017
- Forshaw, James. Attacking network protocols: a hacker’s guide to capture, analysis, and exploitation. No Starch Press, 2017.
Grading
Your grade is the class will mostly depend on your completing the labs, your performance during peer teaching sessions, and your project. If we elect to hold a final exam, it would take-home, and will have minimal impact on your final grade.
Grading breakdown
| Item | Weight |
|---|---|
| Lab assignments | 50% |
| Paper reading | 25% |
| Project | 20% |
| [Tentative] Final exam | 5% |
Instructor
Please see the staff section for information about your teaching crew.