Contact: andrew@cs.unc.edu
Class Meetings: Tue/Thurs 12:30-1:45PM, SN115
Office Hours By Appointment, in FB340
Syllabus
The goal of this course is to give students a broad overview of research topics in the field of computer security. This involves reading and discussing both foundational and recent papers, and conducting a course research project.
Course Structure
Grades will be based upon the following:Class Participation (20%)
Students are expected to contribute to class discussions following paper presentations. Students should be able to ask insightful questions and demonstrate that they have read and understand the assigned readings.
Paper Presentations (20%)
Students will give conference style talks on assigned papers. They will prepare slides and a 15 minute presentation on the papers.
Paper Reviews (20%)
Students will submit mini-reviews on assigned papers to Canvas.
Course Project (40%)
Students will conduct original research on a topic related to computer security over the course of the semester. Students will propose a project part-way through the class, and will submit a final report (6-12 pages) by the end of the course. Students will also give a conference style talk on their results during the final week of class. Working in groups is allowed, but a more substantial product is expected when working as a group.
Reading List
Welcome
Tuesday, August 19 — Welcome/Course Overview
Thursday, August 21 — Instructor Presents
Binary Exploitation
Tuesday, August 26 — Stack Smashing
- Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit. Aleph One. Phrack 49(14), Nov. 1996.
- StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks. USENIX Security 1998.
Thursday, August 28 — Advanced Pwning
Side-Channels
Tuesday, September 2
- Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH. USENIX Security 2001.
- FLUSH+RELOAD: A High Resolution, Low Noise, L3 Cache Side-Channel Attack. USENIX Security 2014.
Thursday, September 4
- Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds. Ristenpart Tromer, Shacham, and Savage. CCS 2009.
- Spectre attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution. Oakland 2019.
Cyber-Physical Systems
Tuesday, September 9
- Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile. Oakland 2010.
- Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces. USENIX Security 2011.
Thursday, September 11
- Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner . USENIX Security 2014.
- Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses. Oakland 2008.
Web Security
Tuesday, September 16
- Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code. Oakland 2009.
- Retrofitting Fine Grain Isolation in the Firefox Renderer. USENIX Security 2020.
Thursday, September 18
No Class-travelingMemory Security+AI Security
Tuesday, September 23
- Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges. Google blog post, 2015.
- SMASH: Synchronized Many-sided Rowhammer Attacks from JavaScript. Usenix Security 2021.
Thursday, September 25 — ML Sec
- Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models. USENIX Security 2021.
- Don't Listen To Me: Understanding and Exploring Jailbreak Prompts of Large Language Models. USENIX Security 2024.
Course Project Proposal Presentations
Tuesday, September 30 — Proposal Presentations
Thursday, October 2 — Proposal Presentations Continued
Nation State Attacks
Tuesday, October 7
No Class-well being dayThursday, October 9
Adverserial Machine Learning
Tuesday, October 14
Thursday, October 16
-No Class-Fall Break.Botnets/Spam
Tuesday, October 21 — Botnets
- Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover. CCS 2009.
- Understanding the Mirai Botnet. USENIX Security 2017.
Thursday, October 23 — Spam
- Detecting and Characterizing LAteral Phishing at Scale. USENIX Security 2019.
- Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion. CCS 2008.
Crypto Fails/Privacy
Tuesday, October 28 — Real World Cryptography
Thursday, October 30 — Privacy
- BlindBox: Deep Packet Inspection over Encrypted Traffic. SIGCOMM 2015.
- Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin. Oakland 2014.
Human Factors
Tuesday, November 4 — Usability
- Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0.. USENIX Security 1999
- Alice in Warningland: A Large-Scale Field Study of Browser Security Warning Effectiveness. USENIX Security 2013.
Thursday, November 6 — Passwords
Tracking
Tuesday, November 11
— Anonymous Browsing
-
Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router.
USENIX Security 2004.
-
How Unique Is Your Web Browser?.
PETS 2010
Thursday, November 13 — Web/Device Tracking
Network/Election Security
Tuesday, November 18 — Disturbance Effects/Forensics
- BadRAM: Practical Memory Aliasing Attacks on Trusted Execution Environments. Oakland 2025
- Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys. USENIX Security 2008.