CS5430: System Security - Overview and Organization

Course URL:   http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/CS5430/2009SP/

Lecture: Attendance is required. All students are responsible for announcements made in lecture and material that is covered in lecture. If you must be absent from a class session, make arrangements with another student to find out what you missed.

10:10 -- 11:25am Monday and Wednesday. Hollister 306.

Instructor:

Professor Fred B. Schneider   (255-9221)   4115C Upson Hall

Office hours: Available after class and most Mon / Wed afternoons. But feel free to drop by anytime without an appointment, and if possible I will meet with you then.

email: fbs@cs.cornell.edu.   Email is great for questions that require a short answer and don't require much context. But email is a horrible way to have a conversation, and most questions about course content and procedures seem to require conversations. Besides, live interactions are more fun and more efficient. Students are therefore urged to email the instructor only when it is sensible. For example, email is a sensible way to set up an appointment to speak in person with the instructor---include choices for days and times that you are available.

Other Staff:

Kevin Walsh	kwalsh@cs.cornell.edu
Dan Williams	djwill@cs.cornell.edu

TA Office Hours: (Office hours start the week of Jan 26.)

Mon.	No TA office hours
Tues.	2:00 - 4:00 Dan Williams, Upson 4104
Wed.	2:00 - 4:00 Kevin Walsh, Upson 5138
Thurs.	2:00 - 4:00 Kevin Walsh, Upson 5138
Fri.	2:00 - 4:00 Dan Williams, Upson 4104

Reading:

Readings to complement the lectures are noted in the course outline.

A text having a large intersection with what we will cover this semester and having a broad coverage of computer security at the MEng level is:

• Matt Bishop, Introduction to Computer Security, Addison Wesley, 2005 (ISBN 0-321-24744-2).

So if you want to purchase a single text for this course, it is a reasonable choice.

The following books, on-reserve in Carpenter Library, should also prove useful. Schneier's book is a classic reference and well worth owning. The Kaufman et al. text is a delightfully written treatment of material we will be covering on network security and cryptographic protocols.

• Bruce Schneier. Applied Cryptography. Second Edition. Wiley, 1996.
• Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner. Network Security. Private Communication in a Public World. Prentice Hall, 1995.

Lecture notes from prior offerings of the lectures can be found on-line. The contents of the lectures change from year to year (and the on-line notes don't aleays get updated in a timely way), so these on-line notes do not substitute for attending class.

Assignments and Grading. Assignments are deliberately underspecified, open-ended, and motivated by problems that arise in the real world (messy as it is) as is consistent with the MEng, hence professional (and practical) orientation, of this course. So you will have to think on your own, build tools, refine problem specifications, make reasonable and defensible assumptions, and be creative. Success in CS5430 (and in life) depends heavily on you figuring out what's important and concentrating on that.

Undergraduate courses give explicit reading assignments and define homework problems closely tied to that reading. CS5430 is not an undergraduate course and doesn't pretend to be. CS5430 students are themselves responsible for identifying and reading the relevant sections of the textbook and on-line lecture notes after material has been covered in lecture. Moreover, assignments in CS5430 may well take a student far beyond that material to other readings.

Your final course grade will be computed as follows:

• 30% Homeworks. There will be 4 or 5 homework assignments. Students are expected to work alone on each; a few assignments may involve programming; the lowest homework grade will be dropped.

• 60% Group Project. Working in a group, you will build a secure system. This semester, all groups will be working on building the same kind of system--a system for electronic trading.

• 10% Entirely Subjective Factors. These include attendance, class participation, and solving extra credit assignments.

All assignments are due on the date stipulated so that correct answers can be freely discussed after the due date. Late submissions are not accepted without prior approval from the instructor.

Academic integrity violations will be prosecuted aggressively. Collaborate with your group on the project; do not collaborate with anyone on the assigned homeworks.

Students are expected to be familiar with the University's and the CS Department's various policies on appropriate use of computers.