Lectures:
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, in the best interests of the class.
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
The course textbook is also available in an online edition; a limited number of people from uWaterloo can be using the online edition at one time. If you are off-campus, you can use the library's proxy service to access the book's proxied URL.
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.
It is expected that you will have read the appropriate sections of the textbook (as noted in the Modules section of LEARN) before class. Additional readings may be assigned as well, and will appear on the lecture slides page; those readings marked as mandatory contain required material for the course; those marked before class must be read before the date of the corresponding lecture.
Grades will be calculated as follows:
Midterm exam time/location: Tuesday, June 7th, 7:00pm
(duration TBD), in DC 1351. There is no alternate midterm.
Final exam time/location: TBD.
The midterm and final are closed-book exams. The midterm covers all material presented up to that point in the course. The final exam covers material from the whole term, with emphasis on the second half of the course. Midterms will be returned in class.
Assignments are due at 3:00 pm Eastern Time on their respective due dates. Late submissions for assignments will be accepted only up to 24 hours after the original due date with a 25% penalty. Course personnel will not give assistance for assignments after their original due dates. Due dates will be posted well in advance in the Assignments section of the LEARN course site. Assignment comments and marks will be returned by email to students' uwaterloo.ca email addresses.
It is your responsibility to keep up with all course-related information posted to LEARN and Piazza.
If you have an assignment that you would like to have reappraised, please follow the instructions given on Piazza to submit your request. If you have an exam that you would like to have reappraised, please provide the course instructor with a written request on paper and your exam. In either case, include a justification for your claims. The appeals deadline is one week after the respective graded item is first made available. Note that for an exam the entire exam will be remarked, and the assigned grade may go up or down as a result.
Please direct all communication to the discussion forum in Piazza. For personal matters, a question that might reveal part of a solution, etc., also ask a question in the Piazza discussion forum, but make it visible only to instructors. This way your question can be read only by the course instructor and the TAs. The instructor or TAs may make a question with limited visibility public if they decide that it is of general interest. Please use regular email only as a last resort, and then it must be from your uwaterloo.ca email address.
Important course information will generally be posted to Piazza or LEARN, but may also be sent to your uwaterloo.ca email address. It is your responsibility to monitor all of these channels.
Students registered in CS 658 must write a research survey paper on a topic related to computer security or privacy. Your topic must be approved in advance by the instructor. 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 USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, or the NDSS Symposium. Your paper should be a summary of past and current work on your topic, as well as an overview of known open problems and potential future directions in the area. You should provide a concise summary of work, emphasizing major accomplishments, rather than a detailed accounting of individual pieces of research activity. Your paper should be formatted in the two-column ACM proceedings format, using one of the ACM SIG Proceedings Templates, and should not be longer than six pages. The ACM templates include headings for "Categories and Subject Descriptors," "General Terms," and "Keywords.", which you do not need to use. The research paper will account for 15% of your overall mark with the other 85% following the proportions of the CS 458 formula. You must submit a one-page proposal to the instructor by June 9th. It is recommended but not required that you discuss the proposal with the instructor first. Additional milestones for the completion of the paper may be set. The final version is due on Aug 11.
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, 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.
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.
AccessAbility Services, located in Needles Hall, Room 1132, 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.