NDAA09031U Proactive Computer Security

Volume 2013/2014
Education
MSc Programme in Computer Science
Content
The goal of this course is to familiarize the student with aspects of it-security. This course will be based on the offensive part of it-security and present the student with selected topics, whereby the student will acquire a basic knowledge of penetration testing.

Learning Outcome
At course completion, the successful student will have:

Knowledge of:
  • The foundation of the internet including firewall functionality, IDS
  • What is: portscanning, fuzzing, stack and heap overflow, shellcode
  • Web security
  • Tools used for it-security and their limitations
  • Mitigation techniques
Skills in:
  • Do reconnaissance of a given target
  • Analysing simple web-services for security problems, especially injection attacks, and demonstrate how to fix them
  • Do basic binary reverse engineering
  • Describe and apply stack overflows and heap overflows, as well as counter mechanisms.
  • Use and develop shellcode
Competences to:
Find and evaluate security issues using fuzzing, static analysis, reverse engineering, and auditing of the source code.
Literature
See Absalon when the course is set up.
You need to be proficient in both high-level and low-level programming, and will be expected to hand-in solutions written in C, assembler, and perhaps PHP or Python. You are expected to have an understanding of the low-level architecture of computers.

The practical work in the course is based on command-line UNIX tools, thus you are expected to have access to a Linux box and have a working knowledge of how to use Linux via a command prompt.
Lectures, exercise labs, and mainly work on the practical individual mandatory given assignments.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 14
  • Practical exercises
  • 14
  • Project work
  • 178
  • Total
  • 206
Credit
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Continuous assessment
Continuous assessment with six to eight written assignments. Pass / Fail. Internal grading. Submission in Absalon.
Marking scale
passed/not passed
Censorship form
No external censorship
Re-exam
Re/-submission of mandatory assignments.
Criteria for exam assesment
See learning outcome.