Network Security Diagram

Course Information

CS 4404: Tools and Techniques - Computer Network Security
Term: B Term, 2022
Time: 12:00pm to 1:50pm
Days: Mondays and Thursdays
Location: Unity Hall 520

Course Catalog Description

This course introduces students to modern network security concepts, tools, and techniques. The course covers security threats, attacks and mitigations at the operating system and network levels (as opposed to the software level). Topics include: authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, privacy, intrusion detection and response, and cryptographic applications. Students will become familiar with modern security protocols and tools. Assignments will involve using security testing software to uncover vulnerabilities, network packet analyzers, and existing security applications to create secure network implementations. The course requires enough programming and systems background to understand attacks and use systems tools, but does not involve significant programming projects. Assignments and projects will use a Linux base for implementation. Students who have credit for CS 558 may not earn subsequent credit for this course. Recommended Background: Knowledge of operating systems (CS3013 or equivalent) and computer networks (CS3516 or equivalent). Familiarity with Linux or Unix is essential.

Teaching Staff

Course Instructor: Craig Shue
Email: please post via the class discussion board
Office: Use Zoom link available via InstructAssist
Office Hours: Mondays, 2pm-3pm; Thursdays, 9am-10am

Teaching Assistant: Shuwen Liu
Office: Use Zoom link available via InstructAssist
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 9am-11am; Wednesdays, 9am-11am

Schedule and Readings

Below is a list of readings for the class, along with deadlines for the Missions and Projects. All students are expected to have read the readings prior to arriving for class on the indicated date. Students can access the readings by clicking on the link associated with the reading assignment or by going to the InstructAssist Resources page to access a .zip archive of the readings.

Date Description Reading
Monday, Oct. 24, 2022 Class: Introduction, Security Overview Chapter 1.1 to 1.5: Pfleeger and Pfleeger, "Is there a security problem in computing?", Security in Computing, 4th edition.
Monday, Oct. 24, 2022 MISSION Mission 1 Launched
Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022 Class: Legality and Ethics David Dittrich, Michael Bailey, Sven Dietrich. "Towards Community Standards for Ethical Behavior in Computer Security Research." Stevens CS Technical Report 2009-1, 20 April 2009.
 
A. Burstein, "Conducting cybersecurity research legally and ethically," in USENIX Workshop on Large- Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), 2008.
Monday, Oct. 31, 2022 Class: Authenticity: TLS T. Chung, J. Lok, B. Chandrasekaran, D. Choffnes, D. Levin, B. Maggs, A. Mislove, J. Rula, N. Sullivan, C. Wilson, "Is the Web Ready for OCSP Must-Staple?," ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2018.
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022 Class: Cryptography Chapter 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6-1.9: A. Menezes, P. Van Oorschot, S. Vanstone. "Handbook of Applied Cryptography," CRC Press ISBN: 0-8493-8523-7, October 1996.
Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 Class: Integrity Robert Topolski. "NebuAd and partner ISPs: Wiretapping, forgery and browser hijacking," Washington DC: FreePress, 2008.
 
Giuseppe Ateniese and Stefan Mangard. "A new approach to DNS security (DNSSEC)," ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2001.
Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 MISSION Mission 1 Debriefing Due, Mission 2 Launched
Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 Class: Authentication: Passwords Sanam Ghorbani Lyastani, Michael Schilling, Sascha Fahl, Michael Backes, Sven Bugiel, "Better managed than memorized? Studying the Impact of Managers on Password Strength and Reuse," USENIX Security, 2018.
Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022 Class: Authentication: Identity and SSO Mohammad Ghasemisharif, Amruta Ramesh, Stephen Checkoway, Chris Kanich, Jason Polakis, "O Single Sign-Off, Where Art Thou? An Empirical Analysis of Single Sign-On Account Hijacking and Session Management on the Web," USENIX Security, 2018.
Monday, Nov. 21, 2022 Class: Authentication: Routing Henry Birge-Lee, Yixin Sun, Anne Edmundson, Jennifer Rexford, Prateek Mittal, "Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP," USENIX Security, 2018.
Monday, Nov. 28, 2022 Class: Authorization: Intrusion Detection V. Paxson, "Bro: A system for detecting network intruders in real-time," Computer Networks, vol. 31, no. 23-24, pp. 2435 - 2463, 1999.
Monday, Nov. 28, 2022 MISSION Mission 2 Debriefing Due, Mission 3 Launched
Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022 Class: Availability: Botnets S. Staniford, V. Paxson, and N. Weaver, "How to 0wn the Internet in your spare time," in Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Security Symposium, vol. 8, 2002, pp. 149 - 167.
Monday, Dec. 5, 2022 Class: VPNs: IPSec C. Shue, Y. Shin, M. Gupta, J. Choi, "Analysis of IPSec Overheads for VPN Servers," IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) Network Protocol Security (NPSec) Workshop, Boston, MA, Nov. 2005.
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022 Class: Privacy Antoine Vastel, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, Romain Rouvoy, "FP-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies," USENIX Security, 2018.
Monday, Dec. 12, 2022 Class: Phishing C. Herley and D. Florencio, "A profitless endeavor: phishing as tragedy of the commons," in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Workshop on New Security Paradigms, 2009, pp. 59 - 70.
Monday, Dec. 12, 2022 MISSION Mission 3 Debriefing Due
Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022 Class: Web Security S. Stamm, Z. Ramzan, M. Jakobsson, "Drive-by Pharming," in Information and Communications Security, 2007.

Course Policies and Procedures

The following represent the official policies and procedures for the course. Please review this information and, if you have questions, discuss them with the professor as soon as possible.

Ethical Hacking Agreement

In this course, students will learn about security, both from a defender and an attacker's perspective. If these tools or techniques were misued, it could have negative ramifications for the student and university. To avoid any potential misunderstanding, students must submit an electronically signed Ethical Hacking Agreement form in the first week of class.

Students that do not sign an Ethical Hacking Agreement in the first week of class will effectively be dismissed from the class. These students will receive an NR grade for the course and will be unable to participate in the practical activities.

Official Communication

Class discussion, class hand-outs, emails to the student's WPI email account, the class discussion board, and the course Web pages are avenues for official course communication. Students are responsible for any information posted through these venues.

Textbooks

We will not be using an assigned textbook in this course. Students will be responsible for obtaining the reading from the links provided by the instructor and, if needed, printing it out for reading.

InstructAssist

This course will use the InstructAssist system which has been developed for interactive instruction. This system features in-class components, including Quiz Bowls and Activities, as well as out-of-class components, such as assignment submission and grading feedback.

This course will use the ScoreKeeper module in InstructAssist. This module allows automatic evaluation and testing of student work, allowing students to rapidly learn about and address any errors.

You can access the InstructAssist system for this class at https://ia.wpi.edu/cs4404/. You will be required to log in through WPI's Central Authentication Service with your WPI credentials to access the system.

Missions

This course will make extensive use of out-of-class assignments called "Missions." Each mission will have a series of objectives that must be met by students in order to earn credit. There will be three missions, each with smaller phases.

All missions must be performed in small teams, unless otherwise indicated. Students may discuss high-level ideas and provide advice to each other to help each other. However, all submitted work must be the result of the student team's own efforts and should not include files or systems used by other students. If students have questions about the appropriate about of collaboration, they should contact their instructor.

These missions are designed to allow students to apply the network security concepts learned in class. Many, if not all, of these missions will make use of an isolated computer network to allow students to experiment without introducing risk to the WPI network. Students will be required to use this physically isolated network using a portable computer in which they have administrative access. A set of virtual machines will be available on this network to help students with their experiments.

Each mission may have a different score weight associated with it. Students should not assume that all missions are of equal weight.

Programming Languages

In this course, the relevant tools students use may impose programming languages constraints. Since this is a 4000-level Computer Science, students are expected to learn a new programming language on-the-fly as needed to complete their tasks. However, students often may select the tool they use, often allowing them to work with tools that use languages the students have mastered.

Since this course is focused on tools and techniques, we recommend students use higher-level languages, such as scripting languages, where possible, so long as the projects meet the underlying performance goals.

Course Participation and Professionalism

During lectures, students are to be focused on the course. Students should not use materials or electronic devices that would inhibit their attention to the course lecture and discussion. Laptops may only be used for note-taking purposes; transmission capabilities on these devices must be disabled and only appropriate note-taking applications may be used in class.

Students must treat each other and the teaching staff with respect at all times. Disagreement, debates, and criticism of ideas are healthy aspects of academic environments; however, students be careful to avoid demeaning language or comments which can be taken personally. The ability to handle conflict professionally and work with a variety of people is an acquired skill, yet it is increasingly important in technical careers.

Late Submission

No quizzes may be submitted late. No make-up quizzes will be available.

Missions may be submitted late, but with significant penalties. Missions that are late, where t represents the amount of time late, will have the following penalties:

0 minutes < t ≤ 1 day10% deduction from maximum grade before the rest of the grading begins
1 day < t ≤ 3 days30% deduction from maximum grade before the rest of the grading begins
3 days < t ≤ 5 days50% deduction from maximum grade before the rest of the grading begins
5 days < tno credit will be awarded

Missions and projects are due at the exact minute specified, with all times rounded down to the nearest minute. The submission system is synchronized via NTP with the CS department servers. This time will be considered official.

Any missions submitted after 4pm on Tuesday, December 13, 2022 will not be graded.

Course Grading

A description of each of the class components is as follows:

BS/MS Graduate Credit

Students may take this course for graduate credit by students in the BS/MS Computer Science program. Students that are interested in obtaining graduate credit will need to make the appropriate arrangements with the professor at the beginning of the class. For two graduate credits, students will need to earn a high grade in the course. For three graduate credits, students will need to make an in-class presentation and paper critique, as well as achieve a minimum final course grade, to obtain such credit.

Student Accessibility Services

Students with approved academic accommodations should plan to submit their accommodation letters through the Office of Accessibility Services Student Portal. Should you have any questions about how accommodations can be implemented in this particular course, please contact me as soon as possible. Students who are not currently registered with the Office of Accessibility Services (OAS) but who would like to find out more information about requesting accommodations, documentation guidelines, and what the accommodated interactive process entails should plan to contact OAS either by email AccessibilityServices@wpi.edu, by phone (508) 831-4908, or by stopping by the office on the 5th floor of Unity Hall.

Academic Integrity

The WPI Academic Integrity Policy describes types of academic dishonesty and requirements in documentation. In the case of academic dishonesty, I am required to report the incident to the Dean of Student Affairs. Further, my penalty for academic dishonesty is to assign a NR grade for the course.

In this class, students may not look at any previous versions of a course assignment or project, regardless of how it is posted. If a student accidentally discovers such a posting, they must report it to the instructor immediately, avoid the resource in the future, and delete any copies that are cached on their computer.

Students are likewise forbidden from facilitating other students, current or future, in plaigarism or cheating. Students may not distribute their code publicly on the Internet, or in other means, during the term or even after the class has concluded. Students may share their code with potential employers or other individuals privately, so long as the code would not become available to other WPI students.