CS5432 Advanced System Security - Topic Outline - Spring 2021

Contents are subject to change, as each topic is reached. Slides could change up until 12n on the day of a lecture. Where available, readings are given that complement lectures.

  1. Introduction [slides]
  2. Authentication of Inanimate Objects
    1. PUFS [Suh and Devadas 2007] [slides]
    2. Measured principals and gating functions [Schneider, Chapter 11] [slides]
      1. Hardware support
      2. Applications
      3. Remote attestation

  3. Authentication logics [slides]
    1. Quick refresher on formal logic. [Chapter 2, On Concurrent Programming (Springer-Verlag, 1997)]
    2. CAL [Schneider, Chapter 9]
      1. Formulas, interpretations, compound principals
      2. Constructive logics and accountability
      3. Credentials and certificates
      4. Applications

  4. Information Flow
    1. Static enforcement [slides]
    2. Dynamic enforcement [slides]
    3. Reactive Information Flow (RIF) [slides] [RIF paper]

  5. Independence and moving target defenses
    1. Secret sharing and threshold cryptography [slides]
    2. Proactive Obfuscation and Moving Target Defenses [slides] [APSS paper] [Proactive Obfuscation paper]

  6. Web Security Origins and Evolution [slides]
    Guest Lecturer: Mary Ellen Zurko (MIT Linclon Laboratory)

  7. Control flow defenses [slides]
    1. Buffer overflows [Aleph One paper]
    2. Return-oriented programming (ROP) [ROP for x86 paper]
    3. CFI enforcement [CFI paper]

  8. Memory defenses
    1. Attacks
    2. Memory safety