Time and Place: Wednesday 7:20~10:00pm at
Art and Design Building L008
Instructor: Dr.
Xinyuan (Frank) Wang
Office: Room 5331, Nguyen Engineering Building
Office phone: (703)
993-9461
Office hours: Wednesday 5:30-7:00pm or by appointment
Email: xwangc at gmu dot edu
Teaching Assistant:
Office hours: None
Course Description
The objective of this course is to provide an in-depth introduction to the security issues - including vulnerabilities, threats, exploits and defense mechanisms in operating systems. Topics covered include: logging, auditing, address space randomization, memory protection, virtual machine introspection (VMI), malware and malware immunization. The course emphasizes on real world vulnerabilities (e.g., buffer overflow), threats, exploits (e.g., gaining remote shell) and defense (e.g., malware immunization). In addition, the course brings the state of the art of operating system security to students and expose them to open problems (e.g., rootkit, malware defense) in operating systems security.
CS 571 and ISA 562; or permission by the instructor.
The students are expected to have good understanding on Unix/BSD/Linux operating system internals (e.g. system call internals, run-time memory organization, assembly language of x86). Proficiency in C programming is essential in order to be successful in the course projects.
There is NO textbook for this course. The course is based on current research papers and technical reports!
Reference Books
Class Schedule (click
to see)
Class
schedule is tentative and subject to change. Please check frequently.
There will be NO written exams :)
Course Lab Assignments
40%
Research Assignment
20%
Course Project
30%
Class Discussion Participation
10%
The final grade is computed according to the following rules:
· A+: >= 95%; A: [90%, 95%); A-: [85%, 90%)
· B+: [80%, 85%); B: [75%, 80%); B-: [70%, 75%)
· C+: [66%, 70%); C: [63%, 66%); C-: [60%, 63%)
· D+: [56%, 60%); D:[53%, 56%); D-: [50%, 53%)
· F: < 50%.
All students are required to follow all university, school and department policies regarding academic integrity. Violator of the Honor Code will result in a grade of F for the course, as well as any penalties imposed by the university and/or the CS department.
If you have a documented learning disability or other condition that may affect academic performance you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with the Office of Disability Services (SUB I, Rm. 222; 703-993-2474; www.gmu.edu/student/drc) to determine the accommodations you need; and 2) talk with me to discuss your accommodation needs. All academic accommodations must be arranged through the ODS.
This course contains materials provided by Dr. Xuxian Jiang (N. C. State University) .