Information Sheet - CSCI 4830/7000

CSCI 4830/7000 - Ethical Hacking Seminar - Fall 2012

Course Information Sheet

Aug 26, 2013

You are responsible for everything on this handout. Please read it.

What's This Course About??

This is a hands-on course about computer security. Security is a vast area, so we cannot hope to cover more than a fraction of introductory material, but we will be ambitious. Expect to work hard.

Meetings

MWF 11:00am-11:50am (Room ECCS 1B14)

Instructor

John Black.
ECOT 627 Phone: 303-492-0573
email: jrblack@cs.colorado.edu.
Web: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jrblack/
Office hours: Mon 9:00am- 9:50am, Wed 2:00pm-2:50pm

Grading

There will be occasional homeworks. There will be occasional quizzes. The final is a live exercise.
Graduate students will additionally be required to complete a project. More details will be given later in the course.
Grade weights for undergrads: 45% homework, 25% quizzes, 20% final exam, 10% class participation. For grads: 35% homework, 20% quizzes, 20% final exam, 15% project, 10% class participation.

Prerequisites

This is primarily a graduate course. We have it cross-listed as an undergraduate course so as not to exclude advanced undergraduates who are nearly finished or who have taken the initiative to learn substantially more than what their classes teach them.

Given the above, the prerequisites for this class are pretty severe: you should have at LEAST an undergraduate education in computer science. This means

Architecture (you know assembly language and computer organization),
Networks (you know what ARP, DHCP, DNS, UDP, TCP/IP, ICMP do and how they work; you know the basics of Ethernet and 802.11, you know what a NAT box is, what a gateway is, what a firewall is, and the difference between a switch and a router)
Operating Systems (you know what a kernel is, you understand processes, threads, virtual memory, file systems, dynamic linkers, machine virtualization, etc)
Programming Languages (you know how high-level languages are converted into machine code, how parameters are passed; you've seen and are familiar with a wide-variety of languages)
Web technology (you know the basic set-ups for common web-technology platforms)

Ideally, you will have some exposure and experience with the following as well:

System Administration (you have administered at least your own machine and perhaps a few others; you have experience with Windows and Unix/Linux)
Security Issues (you know the basics of password strength, perhaps you know how /etc/passwd works on Unix; you know what a DoS attack is)
Application Frameworks (you know how most major network services work like SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SSH; you know web-based technology)
Polyglot (you know a few languages like Bourne/bash, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, HTML, Javascript, SQL)

Finally, you have the heart of a hacker. That is, you are not afraid to dive in and learn something even if you know nothing about it. You love computers and technology and are willing to spend hours rooting out the tiniest details in order to find what you need.

There is no way any of us (myself included) have mastered everything in the list above. But students who find themselves with major gaps in the first list (basic CS background) are probably going to have a rough time in this class; I reserve the right to refuse admission to the class for those who lack the appropriate background. If you want to do a self-assessment, try the hacking test at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jrblack/hacktest.html

Textbook

Gray Hat Hacking

Course Web page

We will maintain useful information on the course web page: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jrblack/class/csci7000/f13

Visit the above page regularly to see what's new. If you miss a handout, get it from here.

Make John Happy

There are several ways to make me happy:

Come to my office only during office hours or with an appointment. (I have a one-track mind and don't handle interruptions well; if people are constantly dropping by without an appointment, I'll never get anything done.)
Before you ask me or the TA for help, make sure you have made a significant effort to answer the question for yourself; it is obvious when a student has worked hard to resolve her/his problem before coming to office hours, and I am far more likely to be helpful for these students
Don't try to ply me for more points. (If there is an obvious grading error, I'm happy to correct it immediately, but if you constantly argue for more partial credit in some gray area, I will exhibit very little patience.)
Come to class on time. (I don't mind people coming in late once in a while, but please don't make a habit of it: it's disrespectful.)