Computer Laboratory

Course pages 2016–17

Security II

As this is a final-year Part II course, students are encouraged to follow their curiosity and read the first-hand research papers listed below as opposed to relying only on the course handout. If you're thinking "Wow! That's a lot of papers! How on Earth am I going to do that?!?" then the advice in the following two-page paper may be helpful in acquiring this vital research skill: S. Keshav, "How to Read a Paper", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 37(3):83--84, 2007.

Lecture slides (by lecturer) and relevant reading material

All lectures 1200-1300 in LT2 @ WGB.

Frank Stajano:
Security, human factors and psychology. Passwords. Security policies. Physical security. (MWF 20 Jan - 1 Feb)
Richard Clayton:
Security economics (Fri 3 Feb)
Steven Murdoch:
Anonymity and censorship resistance (Mon 6 Feb)
Markus Kuhn:
Asymmetric cryptography (MWF 8–24 Feb)
2up handout, 4up handout, slide show, exercise sheet

Exercises and exam questions

You are encouraged to use the online Otter system for supervisions, exercises and exam questions. An old offline exercise sheet for the initial part of the course is still available as a backup for the Otter-challenged, but Otter should be a superset of that.

FMS prepared two question sets, 1 and 2. Supervisor Daniel Thomas kindly imported some cryptography questions into another set; he also provides his own question sets for supervisions 1 and 2, based on FMS's "but with a few tweaks".

Note about exams

Supervisors tell me (FMS) that supervisees repeatedly ask who sets the questions and whether the questions I set will be only on things I lectured and so forth. Let it therefore be known that FMS and MGK will each set one question and that each such question may relate to any part of the syllabus, including topics lectured by the other lecturer or by the guest lecturers. We have constructive proof of me setting and marking a question on a part of the course I did not personally lecture that year.

Instructions for supervisors who need access to the supervisor tab: please email teaching-admin.

Instructions for lecturers: how to edit this page