MSIT 458: Information Security and Assurance

Winter 2010

Yan Chen

I.                 Course description:

The past decade has seen an explosion in the concern for the security of information. This course introduces students to the basic principles and practices of computer and information security.  Focus will be on the software, operating system and network security techniques with detailed analysis of real-world examples. Topics include cryptography, authentication, software and operating system security (e.g., buffer overflow), Internet vulnerability (DoS attacks, viruses/worms, botnets, etc.), intrusion detection systems, firewalls, VPN, Web and wireless network security. 

II.                 Required text and/or other materials:

• Network Security - Private Communication in a Public World, by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman and Mike Speciner, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002.

• Cryptography and Network Security, by William Stallings, 4^th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2006.

III.               Reference text and/or other materials:

• Writing Secure Code, Michael Howard and David LeBlanc, Microsoft Press, 2002.

• Security in Computing, Charles Pfleeger, Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, 3rd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002.

• Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, 2^nd edition, by William R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, and Aviel D. Rubin, Addison Wesley, 2003.

• Lecture Notes on Cryptography, by S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare.

• Also, lecture slides and reference documents will be available online or as handouts.

IV. Required prerequisites or knowledge base

• 421 Principles of Computer and Information Technology

• 432 Communications Networks I

V.                 Rationale for inclusion in MSIT Program:

This course provides students with an extensive understanding of information security management with emphasis on network security.  Whereas other courses provide an overview of the basics of the discipline, information security is simultaneously a technical and managerial discipline with enterprise-wide implications for employees, operations and systems at every level.  For organizations to successfully implement and manage an effective and efficient security program while managing shifting risks associated with interrelated information technology and decision-making employees, contractors, vendors, and suppliers must understand the concepts, technologies and practices of information security and be able to apply them effectively in their own distinctive areas of responsibility.

VI.              Course goal:

• Understand the fundamental principles and underlying technologies of information security and assurance;

• Illustrate the security principles with the state-of-the-art security technologies and products through case studies.

VII.            Course Objectives:

Upon successful completion of this course, the student should be able to:

• Understand the basic principles for information and communication security, and be able to apply these principles to evaluate and criticize information system security properties.

• Be able to identify the vulnerability of the Internet systems and recognize the mechanisms of the attacks, and apply them to design and evaluate counter-measure tools.

VIII.         Course topics/content (by week):

Week 1 (October 2) [crypto.ppt]
Cryptography symmetric/asymmetric encryption (Stallings Chapters 2, 3 and 9, KPS Chapters 2, 3 and 5)

• Symmetric encryption case study: DES/AES algorithms

• Asymmetric encryption case study: RSA

• One-way hash function and message digests: MD5, SHA1, SHA2

• Items Due on Oct. 8:

  • Project part 1, for each individual student

Week 2 (October 9) [invited.pptx][authentication.ppt]
User authentication and authorization and malcode overview (KPS Chapters 9 and 10)

• Invited talk on Identity and Network Access Control by Annie Ballew and Larry Edie (bio), Cisco.

• Authentication mechanisms: password authentication, challenge-response authentication protocols, biometrics, token-based authentication (smart card)

• Related paper: Password Security: A Case History, R. Morris and K. Thompson, Communications of ACM, vol.22 no.11, 1979.

• Items Due:

  • Botnet presentation slides for GTR VersionM (Defense) and the Streeterville (Offense), due on Oct. 11.

  • Botnet paper summary for the other four groups, due on Oct. 13.

  • Homework 1, due on Oct. 13.

Week 3 (October 16) [authentication.ppt]
Authentication in distributed systems, and Internet vulnerability: botnets (Stallings Chapter 19)

• Authentication in distributed systems (case study: Microsoft Passport system and Kerberos)

• Related paper (DEBATE): Taxonomy of Botnet Threats, Trend Micro White Paper, November 2006. GTR VersionM (Defense), and the Streeterville (Offense).
  [Reference] A Survey of Botnet Technology and Defenses, M. Bailey, et al. in the Proc. of the 2009 Cybersecurity Applications & Technology Conference for Homeland Security.

• Homework 2 due on Oct. 20.

Week 4 (October 23) [malcode.ppt]
Internet vulnerability: malcode, denial of service (DoS) attacks and Threat Trend (Stallings Ch.18 and 19)

• Overview on various malcode: virus, worms, botnets, Trojan horses, etc.

• Analysis of worms: target discovery, carrier, activation mechanisms, payload and attackers.

• Related paper: A Taxonomy of Computer Worms, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, S. Staniford, and R. Cunningham, the First ACM Workshop on Rapid Malcode (WORM), 2003.

• Network/Vulnerability scanner (case study: nmap and nessus (demo)).
  We will do a lab for nmap. Before that, you need to download nmap to you computer by following the instructions.

• Items Due:

  • Project problem statement presentation slides from each group, due on Oct. 25

  • Homework 3, due on Oct. 27.

Week 5 (October 30) [invited talk]
Security Policy, Penetration Testing, and Layer 2 Attacks.

• Invited talk by Brandon Hoffman, Director of Sales Engineering for Redseal, a security software company.

• Project problem statement presentation and feedback from each group

  • Security of eHealth Information HIPAA Compliance at HRA by the GTR ver M.

  • Firewall Security with Special Emphasis on SMTP by the Intercontinental Group.

  • Authentication: Password Madness by the Locals.

  • Mobile Device Security by the Magic.

  • Defending Against Users Executing Malware Code via Email by the Streeterville.

  • You've Been Hacked, Now What? by the Wild Wild West.

• Items Due:

  • Web security presentation slides for the Locals (Defense) and the Wild Wild West (Offense) due by Nov. 5 (outline due by Nov. 1).

  • Web security summary for the other four groups by Nov. 4.

  • Homework 4, due by Nov. 4.

  Note: please also read the related paper on Web vulnerability analysis. It will be great if you can incorporate that into your presentation slides and paper summary

Week 6 (November 6) [DoS.ppt] [web.ppt]
DoS Attacks, WWW Security and Defense

• DoS attacks (case study: TCP SYN flooding attacks)

• Cross site scripting, SQL injection, shell attacks, etc. (demo tutorial and SSH set up instructions if you would like to try the demo yourself).

• Related paper: Detecting SYN Flooding Attacks, H. Wang, D. Zhang, and K. G. Shin, in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2002  [Full version is at Change-Point Monitoring for Detection of DoS Attacks,  H. Wang, D. Zhang, and K. G. Shin, in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 1, No. 4, December 2004.].

• Related paper (DEBATE): Web Based Attacks, Symantec white paper, Feb. 2009. Here is the related podcast from Symantec. the Locals (Defense) and the Wild Wild West (Offense).

  • Reference paper: Vulnerability Analysis of Web-Based Applications, Marco Cova, Viktoria Felmetsger, Giovanni Vigna, Chapter in ``Test and Analysis of Web Services", Springer, September 2007. [reference slides].

• Homework 5, due on Nov. 11.

Week 7 (November 13) [invited talk][IDS.ppt][snort.ppt]
Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (Stallings Chapter 18 and 20)

• Invited talk on "Cyber Crime Past, Present and Future!" by Jibran Ilyas, Senior Incident Response Consultant, Trustwave Inc. (Bio)

• Case study on IDS/IPS: snort IDS.

• Items Due:

  • Homework 6, due on Nov. 18.

  • Wireless security presentation slides for the Magic (Defense) and Inter Continental (Offense), outline due on Nov. 15 and slides due on Nov. 19.

  • wireless security paper summary for the other four groups, due on Nov. 18.

Week 8 (November 20) [firewalls.ppt] [wirelessSec.ppt] [wirelessSec_compliance.pdf]
Firewalls, Wireless network security, its related compliance, and technology integration.

• Technology integration for wireless network security and compliance.

• Handout from Chapter 9 of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker.

• Related paper (DEBATE): Wireless and Network Security Integration Solution Overview, Cisco Inc. Here are more detailed guidelines on the solutions (i.e., expanding the overview). the Magic (Defense), and Inter Continental (Offense).

• Items Due:

  • Homework 7, due on Dec. 2.

  • presentation slides for project part III (Outline due Nov. 29, slides due Dec. 2).

Week 9 (December 4 morning)[CloudSecurity.pdf] [principle.ppt][bufferOverflow.ppt] [ipsec.ppt]
Cloud Security, Software Security, and IPSec (Stallings Chapters16 and KPS Chapter 17)

• Invited talk by Kurtis Minder, CISSP, Global Account Manager, Fortinet Inc.

• Software security, buffer overflow attacks and defense.

• Related papers: Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit, by Aleph One.
  Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerability of the Decade, by Crispin Cowan, et al.

Week 10 (December 4 afternoon)
Review of the class and Layered Defense

• Information security in real business presentation by each group (proposed solutions and analysis)

  • You've Been Hacked, Now What? by the Wild Wild West.

  • Defending Against Users Executing Malware Code via Email by the Streeterville.

  • Firewall Security with Special Emphasis on SMTP by the Intercontinental Group.

  • Mobile Device Security by the Magic.

  • Authentication: Password Madness by the Locals.

  • Security of eHealth Information HIPAA Compliance at HRA by the GTR ver M.

• Items Due on Dec. 9.

  • Homework 8.

  • Final project report.

The lecture notes have incorporated course materials developed by Dan Boneh (Stanford), Wenke Lee (Georgia Tech), David Lie (U Toronto), Aleph One, Vitaly Shmat (UT Austin), Martin Roesch (Sourcefire Inc.), and David Dittrich (University of Washington).

IX. Teaching methods: lectures, paper presentations, debate, project, and homework.

X. Assignments

There will be several group-based homework assignments so that students can reflect on what they learn in each class and try to apply them. In the beginning of each class, I will randomly pick some student(s) to report their answers (and reasoning!) to the homework as warm-up for each class. This will be considered as individual performance in this course.

In addition, students are expected to engage in technical paper reading, making presentations and debate. These papers are carefully selected (with little math!) which can be understood with the basic information security and networking knowledge. There will be three debates with one group as defense and one group as offense. The defense team will make 30-minute presentation on the main idea/techniques of the paper while the offense team will make a 15-minute presentation on the drawbacks/shortcomings of the approach. Then we will discuss and summarize the findings.

All of the assignments, including homework, presentation draft, and paper summaries, are due on Monday midnight of corresponding weeks. For presentation draft, I will give comments on the following Tue or Wed for revision. Presentation groups do not need to submit paper summaries.

Your summary should include at least:

• Paper title and its author(s).

• Brief one-line summary.

• A paragraph of the one or two most significant new insight(s) you took away from the paper.

• A paragraph of the one or two most significant flaw(s) of the paper: maybe an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.

• A last paragraph where you state the relevance of the ideas today, potential future research suggested by the article, etc.

Project: each group will work on a quarter-long project called Information Security in Real Business with the following steps.

1. Understanding the security requirements in your corporate/organization, using the four cornerstones of secure computing introduced in the class. Please describe the requirement, how your corporate/organization handles that requirement and what remains to be done to fully satisfy that requirement. The requirement does not need to be restricted to a technical one, but can be related to legal, business, social, or anything to do with information security.

   This is required for each student. In the submission, please also give suggestions on the current syllabus, e.g., important topics which are currently missing, interesting extra teaching materials that you are aware of, etc. I will try to make adjustment based on the suggestions. The suggestion part is optional. It will not affect your grade if you don't have any.

2. Based on the requirements, pick one problem that most of your group members have interest in, and it is not yet well solved in your corporate/organization. If you are uncomfortable talking about your employers security practices, you can anonymize the name or use a hypothetical case but reflects the real problems in industry. Formulate a security problem and do some research on the related work. Please show why this problem is a general one that comes across multiple industry/education/government sectors. Each group is expected to give a short presentation (5 minute) to seek synergy and early feedback from other students and the instructor (maximal another 5 minutes for each group) in week 5.

3. Then please analyze the pros and cons on the existing work, and propose a solution to the problem you formulated, by either adopting existing solutions, or propose something new. Please be specific on how you will implement or have implemented the solutions, the cost/risk analysis, feasibility analysis, business/legal consequence, how this solution will fit different corporate context, like industry, education, government, etc. Each group is expected to give a final project presentation in the class of week 10. The presentation is expected to be 15 minutes plus 3 minutes Q&A. But we can have Q&A mingled w/ the presentation, i.e., each team has 18 minutes, excluding the switch time.
   You are also expected to submit a project report similar to a workshop paper (5-6 pages, with no larger than 11 point font, at most 1 inch margin, and single spacing. Double column is preferred though single column is OK.)

XI. Grading criteria

• Class participation and discussions (including individual tests of homework in class): 30%

• Paper summary and debate: 20%

• Homework assignments (including group quizzes): 30%

• Project submission and presentation: 20%

XII.Instructor profile

Yan Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003. He has over ten years of experience in network security, network and distributed system measurement and diagnosis, for both wired and wireless networks. He won the Department of Energy (DOE) Early CAREER award in 2005, the DoD (Air Force of Scientific Research) Young Investigator Award in 2007, and the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Awards in 2004 and 2005 with his colleagues. His research is also sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) and Motorola. In addition to the industry sponsors, he has widely collaborated with industry researchers from Microsoft, AT&T, Motorola, Yahoo, Keynote, and the Internet Storm Center of the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute. According to Google Scholar, his papers have been cited for more than 3,000 times. He has also offered security consulting services to several companies.

He started several security courses at Northwestern University, including the EECS 350 Introduction to Computer Security, EECS 354 Network Penetration and Security, and EECS 450 Internet Security. He was awarded as a Searle Junior Fellow by the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence of Northwestern University in 2004.