| Instructors | Urs Hengartner Adithya Vadapalli, |
| Office Hours | 11:00 am–noon on Wednesdays or by appointment in MS Teams; see the MS teams page link below. |
| urs.hengartner@uwaterloo.ca, adithya.vadapalli@uwaterloo.ca | |
| Lectures | Visit the course LEARN site to view the pre-recorded lectures (in the Course Modules section), which will be posted on the first day of each module. Starting dates for modules are listed on LEARN (on the "IMPORTANT DATES" page in the "Important Course Information" section). |
| LEARN | Course site on LEARN |
| Piazza | Course page on Piazza |
| MS Teams | Course team on MS Teams (See the University's MS Teams website on how to access/install MS Teams.) |
| Optional On-Campus Lectures | Wednesdays 1:00pm–2:20pm in MC 2038. Attendance is voluntary. See the rationale for optional campus lectures below. |
This syllabus is a guideline for the course and not a contract. As such, its terms may be altered when doing so is, in the opinion of the instructor(s), in the best interests of the class.
This course provides an introduction to security and privacy issues in various aspects of computing, including programs, operating systems, networks, databases, and Internet applications. It examines causes of security and privacy breaches, and gives methods to help prevent them.
Students completing this course should be better able to produce programs that can defend against active attacks, and not just against random bugs.
Third or fourth year CS students (CS 458), or first year CS graduate students (CS 658)
CS 350 (Operating Systems). Familiarity with C.
This syllabus is a guideline for the course and not a contract. As such, its terms may be altered when doing so is, in the opinion of the instructor(s), in the best interests of the class.
Grades will be calculated as follows for undergraduate students:
Assignments: The first three assignments contain both written and programming exercises and cover the new material in the course since the previous assignment. Assignment 4 is written-only but covers material from the whole term. If your score in Assignment 4 is below 50%, you cannot pass the course.
Please start working on the assignments in advance of the deadlines. To motivate you to do so, we may require you to submit milestones for some or all of them.
Late submissions for Assignments 1, 2 or 3 will be accepted only up to 48 hours after the original due date. There is no penalty for accepted late submissions. Assignments can be submitted multiple times - the last one will be used for marking. Course personnel will not normally give assistance for assignments after their original due dates. (There will be no assistance from course staff for Assignment 4.)
The 48 hours grace period does not apply to the due dates for the self-tests, Assignment 4, any milestones of Assignment 1, 2, or 3s, Assignment 4 or the CS 658 proposal and research survey paper; no lates will be accepted for them. Update (Oct 13): The 48 hours grace period also applies to the milestones of assignments 2 and 3.
You must notify your instructor(s) well before the due date of any severe, long-lasting problems that prevent you from completing an assignment on time.
Assignments 1, 2, and 3 are due at 3:00 pm Eastern Time on their respective due dates. These assignments are to be submitted electronically with the "submit" command, see the 'Course Mechanics' section below. Assignments submitted by other means will not be accepted. Assignment 1, 2 and 3 comments and marks will be returned using infodist. Again, see the 'course mechanics' section below.
Optional on-campus lectures: These lectures are an experiment in the the flipped classroom approach and as such, augment the recorded lectures (some of which are recordings from a previous term). Attendance is voluntary and optional. Knowledge of material covered only in the on-campus lectures will not be required for solving the assignments. The on-campus lectures will not be recorded but slides presented during the lectures will be made available on LEARN. The instructors reserve the right to cancel the optional on-campus lectures if they deem it necessary due to the pandemic.
Self-tests: Self-tests are meant to help you keep up with the material, that is, to assess and improve your understanding of basic concepts. You can attempt each self-test as often as you like during its availability period; your last grade on each self-test will be the one recorded (although course personnel can see every attempt). The availability and deadline information will be posted on LEARN ("IMPORTANT DATES" page in the "Important Course Information" section). Late self-tests cannot be made up for any reason, including students signing up for the class late. Again, the 48 hours grace period does not apply to the due dates for the self-tests.
Students registered in CS 658 must write a research survey paper on a topic related to computer security or privacy. You should read Keshav's How to Read a Paper to efficiently read a paper and conduct a literature survey. In writing your paper, you must become familiar with the research literature relevant to your topic. Your focus should be on academic venues, such as the USENIX Security Symposium , ACM CCS, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) or the NDSS Symposium. Visit LEARN for deadlines for the proposal and paper. You should email your topic, proposal and paper to the instructors.
If you have an assignment that you would like to have reappraised, please follow the instructions given on Piazza to submit your request. Include a clear justification for your claims. The appeals deadline is one week after the respective graded item is first made available. Note that for assignment 4, the entire assignment will be remarked, and the assigned grade may go up or down as a result. If your appeal is concerned with a simple calculation error, please see the TA(s) during their office hours.
Paul van Oorschot, Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels, Springer, 2020, ISBN: 978-3-030-33648-6 (hardcopy), 978-3-030-33649-3 (eBook) https://people.scs.carleton.ca/~paulv/toolsjewels.html
This text book is freely available for download from the author's web page.
Charles P. Pfleeger, Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, and Jonathan Margulies, Security in Computing, 5th edition, Prentice-Hall, 2015, ISBN 0-13-408504-3 http://www.informit.com/store/security-in-computing-9780134085043
It is expected that you will have read the appropriate sections of the textbook(s) while or after watching the lecture videos. Additional readings may be assigned, and will appear on LEARN; readings marked as mandatory contain required material for the course. You should read these mandatory readings as well, in tandem with viewing the corresponding videos.
It is your responsibility to keep up with all course-related information posted to LEARN, the course Piazza site, and the course website.
Piazza: Please direct all communication to the discussion forums in Piazza. This includes questions on materials in lecture videos, assignments, and general logistics.
Etiquette:
LEARN: Deadlines for assessment items have been included in the "IMPORTANT DATES" page on LEARN (in the Important Course Information section). Lecture will be posted periodically on LEARN (in their respective sections). Links to textbooks are also be available on LEARN.
Email: Important course information will generally be posted to LEARN, but may also be sent to your uwaterloo.ca email address. For personal matters, such as an illness, please email the instructors directly. We will only reply back to email from your uwaterloo.ca email address, for privacy rules.
In this course, you will be exposed to information about security problems and vulnerabilities with computing systems and networks. To be clear, you are not to use this or any other similar information to test the security of, break into, compromise, or otherwise attack, any system or network without the express consent of the owner. In particular, you will comply with all applicable laws and UW policies, including, but not limited to, the following:
Violations will be treated severely, and with zero tolerance.
Students are encouraged to talk to one another, to the TAs, to the instructor(s), or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Any assistance, though, must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write his or her own solutions, including code and documentation if appropriate, for the assignments. Consulting another student's solution is prohibited, and submitted solutions may not be copied from any source. In particular, submitting assignments copied in whole or in part from assignment submissions to a previous offering of this course, or from any offering of any other course, is forbidden, even if a student is resubmitting his or her own work. These and any other forms of collaboration on assignments constitute cheating. If you have any questions about whether some activity constitutes cheating, please ask the instructor(s).
The general Faculty and University policy:
Academic Integrity: In order to maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo community are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility. Check the Office of Academic Integrity's website for more information.
All members of the UW community are expected to hold to the highest standard of academic integrity in their studies, teaching, and research. This site explains why academic integrity is important and how students can avoid academic misconduct. It also identifies resources available on campus for students and faculty to help achieve academic integrity in — and out — of the classroom.
Grievance: A student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of his/her university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating a grievance. Read Policy 70 — Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4. When in doubt please be certain to contact the department's administrative assistant who will provide further assistance.
Discipline: A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity, to avoid committing academic offenses, and to take responsibility for his/her actions. A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offense, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offenses (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about "rules" for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course professor, academic advisor, or the Undergraduate Associate Dean. For information on categories of offenses and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71 — Student Discipline. For typical penalties, check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties.
Avoiding Academic Offenses Most students are unaware of the line between acceptable and unacceptable academic behaviour, especially when discussing assignments with classmates and using the work of other students. For information on commonly misunderstood academic offenses and how to avoid them, students should refer to the Faculty of Mathematics Cheating and Student Academic Discipline Policy.
Appeals: A decision made or a penalty imposed under Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances (other than a petition) or Policy 71, Student Discipline may be appealed if there is a ground. A student who believes he/she has a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72 — Student Appeals.
It is our intent that students from all diverse backgrounds and perspectives be well served by this course, and that students' learning needs be addressed both in and out of class. We recognize the immense value of the diversity in identities, perspectives, and contributions that students bring, and the benefit it has on our educational environment. Your suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. Please let us know ways to improve the effectiveness of the course for you personally or for other students or student groups. In particular:
AccessAbility Services, located in Needles Hall North, Room 1401, collaborates with all academic departments to arrange appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising the academic integrity of the curriculum. If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your disability, please register with AccessAbility at the beginning of each academic term.
The Faculty of Math encourages students to seek out mental health support if needed.
On-campus Resources:
Off-campus Resources:
We acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometres on each side of the Grand River.