Computer security and privacy

General

• Lectures will be held only in-person every Thursday 9h15-12h00 in the STCC. 
• Exercise sessions will be live and in-person every Thursday, 13h15-15h00
• the mid-term will be in-person and on site (on Thursday Nov 6 (closed book))
• the final exam will be held in-person and on site during the exam session in Jan/Feb (closed book)

In More Detail

Course Logistics

From Thursday Sept 6 on, every following week will have the same structure: 

• Thursday (9h15-12h00 in the STCC). In-person lecture followed by an interactive problem solving session led by Prof. Thomas Bourgeat.   
  

• Thursday (13h15-15h00 in INF019, INF213): Q&A time. During the Q&A time, the TAs will be available to answer questions about the programming assignments (graded assignments), theory exercises, practice problem sets, or lecture material. The TAs best suited to answer questions about the programming homework are: Mohamed, Donia, Julian, Robin, André and Samuel. The TAs best suited to answer questions about theory are Eric, Saiid, Christian, and Malo. 

Course Activities

There are four different types of activities that you are expected to actively participate in

• Lectures: Lectures will be held live and in-person this year. Slides (without notes) will be published before the start of each week's lecture. The lectures will convey the theoretical foundations that you will need to participate in all other course activities. You are expected to attend lectures to follow the course material. As a backup, recordings of the lectures from 2021 will be published.
• Interactive Problem Solving: Interactive exercise are a set of questions we will solve together (either the whole class or in small groups, see above) in an interactive manner. Mostly, these questions are very open and thus do not have one single correct solution. You are not expected to solve these exercises before coming to the interactive exercise session. The only preparation needed is to attend the lecture given that week. Some notes about the proposed solutions will be published after the exercise sessions. However, these are not a replacement for attending the exercise session itself and actively participating in the discussion. We expect students to actively participate in the interactive exercise sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Actively participating enables students to practice their security skills and learn from their mistakes. This helps to better understand of the concepts taught in this course and will greatly help at the time of taking exams.
• Practice Problem Sets: Previous exams questions that we encourage you to solve during the exercise sessions Thursday afternoon.
  
• Programming assignments: These are graded assignments that you are expected to solve on your own and individually at home. If you get stuck or need help, the TA team will be available during dedicated hours to answer your questions.
• Theory exercises: Each week, we will publish an exercise sheet with some theory questions about the content of the course. These exercises are meant to help you revisit the course material and prepare for the midterm and the final exam. At the end of each week, we will release written solutions to these exercises. You are expected to solve theory exercises at home. If you have trouble solving some of the exercises or to understand the proposed solutions, the TA team will be available during dedicated hours to answer your questions.
  

"I have a question"

Grading

The final grade is computed as the maximum of the following two combinations

• 60% final ; 30% mid-term ; 10% programming assignments
• 90% final; 10% programming assignments

This means that the other activities: theory exercises, practice problem sets, in-class participation, will not be graded. Yet, we strongly recommend you perform them with the same attention as they will greatly help you in your graded activities

Programming assignments will be announced on the grading system (com301.epfl.ch). Each homework will be graded on 100 points. The final assignment grade will be computed on the total of 500 points.  There is zero tolerance for collaboration on the homeworks.  Before the first homework, get your Linux environment ready (Virtualbox).  You may collaborate on the setup.  More information on the homeworks and the publication and hand-in days can be found in the Programming homeworks page.

Reference books

(Here you can find a mapping between concepts taught in the course and these books in the section below)

• Computer security, by D. Gollmann - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wics.106
  
• Security Engineering, by R. Anderson - https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
• Computer Security Principles and practice, by W. Stallings and L. Brown - http://williamstallings.com/ComputerSecurity/

Videos for Lectures available here:

MAC-Part 1, MAC-Part 2, MAC-Part 3

Videos for Lectures available here:

Authentication 1, Authentication 2, Authentication 3, Authentication 4

Videos for Lectures available here:

Adversarial Thinking 1, Sudo bug demo, Adversarial Thinking 2