Introduction to Security

Lecturer: Dr R. Anderson (rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 4

Prerequisite courses: Operating System Foundations, Mathematics for Computation Theory

This course is a prerequisite for Distributed Systems (Diploma).

Typical applications.

Cash machines, prepayment cards, book-keeping systems, multilevel secure systems, electronic warfare. Goals and definitions: security policy models.

Operating system security.

Access matrices, access control lists, capabilities. Unix security: password cracking, stack overflow and other common attacks. Firewalls: common attacks on TCP/IP.

Symmetric cryptosystems.

Stream and block ciphers. The Feistel construction: TEA and DES. Modes of operation. Examples of applications. Key exchange protocols.

Asymmetric cryptosystems.

Diffie-Hellman key exchange. ElGamal encryption and signature; the US digital signature standard. Basic public key protocols and their problems, including Denning-Sacco, Needham-Schroder and oracle attacks.

Recommended books:

Schneier, B. (1995). Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source in C. Wiley (2nd ed.).

Garfinkel, S. & Spafford, G. (1996). Practical Unix and Internet Security. O'Reilly and Associates (2nd ed.).

Further reading:

Kahn, D. (1966). The Codebreakers: the Story of Secret Writing. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Cheswick, W.R. & Bellovin, S.M. (1994). Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker. Addison-Wesley.

Amoroso, E. (1994). Fundamentals of Computer Security Technology. Prentice-Hall.