Security & Privacy Preliminary Exam Syllabus

Cryptography

• Practical Cryptography, Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4.1-4.4, 4.5.1,4.5.8, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0-6.2, 7.0-7.5, 8.0-8.3, 12.0-12.3, 13.4.0-13.4.2, 13.5-13.7, 14, 15.0-15.8, 18, 19, 20.7-20.10, 23.1.
• Why Cryptosystems Fail, Ross Anderson, ACM CCS 1993.
• Prudent engineering practice for cryptographic protocols, Martin Abadi, Roger Needham, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 22(1):6--15.
• Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems, Paul Kocher, CRYPTO 1996.

Access control, memory protection, and database security

• The Craft of System Security, Sean Smith, John Marchesini, Addison-Wesley, 2007. Read Chapter 4.1-4.2.
• A note on the confinement problem, Butler Lampson, CACM 16(10):613--615.
• Computer Security, Dieter Gollmann, Wiley, 1999. Read Chapter 14 (Database Security).

Software security

• Beyond stack smashing: recent advances in exploiting buffer overruns, Jonathan Pincus, Brandon Baker, IEEE Security & Privacy 2(4):20--27, Jul-Aug 2007.
• Taint-Enhanced Policy Enforcement: A Practical Approach to Defeat a Wide Range of Attacks, Wei Xu, Sandeep Bhatkar, R. Sekar, Usenix Security 2006.
• Preventing Privilege Escalation, Niels Provos, Markus Friedl, Peter Honeyman, Usenix Security 2003.
• Extensible security architectures for Java, Dan Wallach, Dirk Balfanz, Drew Dean, Edward Felten, SOSP 1997.
• Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation, Robert Wahbe, Steven Lucco, Thomas Anderson, Susan Graham, SOSP 1994.

Security and usability

• Why Johnny Can't Encrypt, Alma Whitten, J.D. Tygar, in Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use.
• Why Phishing Works, Rachna Dhamija, J.D. Tygar, Marti Hearst, ACM CHI 2006.

Privacy and anonymity

• Privacy, economics, and price discrimination on the internet, Andrew Odlyzko, ICEC 2003.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet, Ian Goldberg, David Wagner, Eric Brewer, IEEE COMPCON 1997.
• Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, USENIX Security 2004.

Legal/policy/economic issues

• Why Information Security is Hard - An Economic Perspective, Ross Anderson, ACSAC 2001.
• Conducting Cybersecurity Research Legally and Ethically, Aaron Burstein, Usenix LEET 2008.

Network security

• Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity, David Moore, Colleen Shannon, Douglas Brown, Geoffrey Voelker, Stefan Savage, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 24(2):115--139.
• Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time, Vern Paxson, Computer Networks, 31(23-24), pp. 2435--2463, 14 Dec. 1999.
• A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Jay Zarfoss, Fabian Monrose, Andreas Terzis, IMC 2006.
• How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time, Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson, Nicholas Weaver, USENIX Security 2002.
• Detecting stepping stones, Yin Zhang, Vern Paxson, USENIX Security 2000.
• Practical Network Support for IP Traceback, Stefan Savage, David Wetherall, Anna Karlin, Tom Anderson, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, 9(3):226--237.
• SIFF: A Stateless Internet Flow Filter to Mitigate DDoS Flooding Attacks, Abraham Yaar, Adrian Perrig, Dawn Song, IEEE S&P 2004.
• The Resurrecting Duckling: security issues for ubiquitous computing, Frank Stajano, Ross Anderson, IEEE Computer, 35(4):22--26.
• Firewall Gateways, Chapter 3 of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, Cheswick and Bellovin (1st ed).

Intrusion detection

• Anomaly Detection of Web-based Attacks, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna, ACM CCS 2003.
• The Base-Rate Fallacy and its Implications for the Difficulty of Intrusion Detection, Stefan Axelsson, RAID 1999.
• Testing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Critique of the 1998 and 1999 DARPA Off-line Intrusion Detection System Evaluation as Performed by Lincoln Laboratory, John McHugh, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 3(4):262--294, November 2000.

  Note: The aspects of the McHugh paper relevant for the prelim concern (1) how to soundly evaluate security systems, (2) the difficulties of constructing sufficiently realistic representations of benign behavior, (3) the issues that arise when attempting to define common metrics for comparison, and (4) how taxonomies can shape one's view of a problem domain. You do not need to concern yourself with the details of how the paper applies these concerns to the specific evaluation of intrusion detection systems.

Case studies

• Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine, Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, Edward W. Felten, EVT 2007.
• Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode, J. Alex Halderman, Edward W. Felten, USENIX Security 2006.
• Tamper Resistance-- A cautionary note, Ross Anderson, Markus Kuhn, USENIX Electronic Commerce 1996.