Welcome to 18-731: Network Security

Instructor: Adrian Perrig, office hours by request.
TAs: Vivek Chudgar (OH: Wednesday 1-2pm, Room 212@INI), Jon McCune (OH: Monday 9:30-10:30am, at the entrance of classroom), Nandan Telang (OH: Tuesday 12-1pm, Room 211@INI), Andrew Williams (OH: Friday 10:30-11:30am, Hamerschlag Hall A-level conference room), Cynthia Wong (OH: Thursday 9:30-10:30am, Hamerschlag Hall D-level cube C5).
We will meet Monday and Wednesday in Baker Hall 136a 10:30-11:50am.

Course Description:
Some of today's most damaging attacks on computer systems involve exploitation of network infrastructure, either as the target of attack or as a vehicle to advance attacks on end systems. This course provides an in-depth study of network attack techniques and methods to defend against them. Topics include firewalls and virtual private networks; network intrusion detection; denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; DoS and DDoS detection and reaction; worm and virus propagation; tracing the source of attacks; traffic analysis; techniques for hiding the source or destination of network traffic; secure routing protocols; protocol scrubbing; and advanced techniques for reacting to network attacks.

The course will involve several programming projects in C, students are expected to have a solid foundation in C and Unix programming.

Students are also expected to have passed the introductory security classes 18-630 or 18-730 and understand concepts of applied cryptography. To refresh this material, you can read the following chapters in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 18, 19.3, 22. Students that took 18-630 need to review Chapter 9, as we did not cover that material in 18-630.

Syllabus

Suggested (optional) Textbooks:

Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, Mike Speciner.
Secure Broadcast Communication in wired and wireless networks by Adrian Perrig and Doug Tygar.
Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice by Stallings.

Late Policy:
The deadline for any assignment can be extended with a 10% penalty per day. No deadline can be extended by more than two days. so assignments will NOT be accepted 48 hours after the due date.

Collaboration Policy:
Students are encouraged to talk to each other, to the TAs, to the instructor, or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Any assistance, though, must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write out his or her own solutions to the homeworks. Consulting another student's or group's solution is prohibited, and submitted solutions may not be copied from any source. These and any other form of collaboration on assignments constitute cheating. If you have any question about whether some activity would constitute cheating, please feel free to ask.

Grading:
Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights for the individual assignments: The midterm and final exams will be in-class and closed-book.