CS 3C03 / SE 4C03
Computer Networks & Security
Winter 2012

• Instructor: Michael Soltys, email: soltys@mcmaster.ca
• TA:
  • Jason Jaskolka <jason.jaskolka@gmail.com>
  • Yinghui Wang <wang382@mcmaster.ca>
• Tutorials/Labs/Office Hours:
  • Tuesdays 14:30-16:00 in ITB/235 (starting Jan 17).
  • Wednesdays 14:30-16:00 in ITB/235 (starting Jan 18).
• Course Information
• Lectures: Mo, We, Th 13:30-14:20, in HSC/1A6.
• Office Hours: We & Th 14:30-15:30, in ITB/214.
• Course outline: The calendar description is as follows: Physical networks, TCP/IP protocols, switching methods, network layering and components, network services. Information security, computer and network security threats, defense mechanisms, encryption. We are going to concentrate on the network security aspects, especially on cryptography; a mixture of theory and programming assignments in Python.
• Textbook:

  Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman and Mike Speciner Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World. 2nd edition 2002 Published by Prentice Hall

• Please Read: McMaster Academic Integrity Statement.
• This course was taught last year as CS3CN3/SE4C03.
• Reading List

Announcements:

• Apr 2: I will have extra office hours on Wednesday, from 2:30 (right after class) until 5pm. There are no office hours on Thursday.
• Mar 29: Today Jason Jaskolka will be talking about IPsec, chapters 17 and 18 in the textbook. On Monday April 2, I will finish some loose ends, and start reviewing the course. I will end the review on Wednesday April 4. The exam will consist of 6 questions, based on all the material covered in the course, in the style of the test questions — but you are not responsible for the articles that we read during the course. There will be no usual office hour on Thursday April 5, but I am available to meet anytime on Wednesday April 4. One more article regarding Network/Security certification has been posted in the Reading List.
• Mar 26: Test 4 with solutions has been posted below.
• Mar 20: The last test, test 4, will take place on Monday March 26. For that test, you are responsible for the following:
  • The article, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
  • Two questions from chapters: 9,10,11,12,15 (note that you are not responsible for the test for chapters 13 and 14 — which contain detailed descriptions of Kerberos).
• Mar 15: New items on the Google search engine have been added to the reading list (2 new articles, and some notes).
• Mar 14: In assignment 2, a XOR with CBC is all that is expected for the encryption of the message; you do not have to implement any complicated crypto function. Use a (hard-coded) key K to XOR the message with cipher-block chaining. But there are a lot of details to make explicit here; include them in the writeup.
• Mar 9: The last batch on slides on PKC has been posted on the Reading List.
• Mar 5: Solutions to test 3 have been posted below.
• Feb 29: Test 3 is coming up on Monday March 5. The material covered for the test is as follows:
  • The first question will be based on one of the following three articles from the reading list: Gary Anthes, Security in the Cloud, ACM 2010; Brian Hayes, Cloud computing, ACM 2008; Jason Hong, The state of phishing attacks, Communications of the ACM, January 2012.
  • One question from chapters 3,4,5.
  • One question about Public Key crypto, chapter 6.
  A good preparation from the test, besides re-reading (and understanding!) the slides, the lecture notes, and the material in the relevant chapters (and articles), is to do a few practice problems in KPS; they are very accessible, and help with the understanding of the material.
• Feb 24: Assignment 2, due on March 30, has been posted below.
• Feb 21: The marking scheme for assignment 1 has been posted below.
• Feb 21: The latest batch of slides has been posted in the reading list.
• Feb 19: If you did not hand in assignment 1 due to illness, I will require the following steps from you:
  • Report it in the online McMaster Student Absence Form (MSAF).
  • Write a short letter explaining the situtation, attach a copy of a doctor's note, and give it to me (the instructor).
  • Show me (the instructor) the original of the doctor's note.
• Feb 17: New articles have been posted in the reading section.
• Feb 13: Assignment 1 is due on Friday (February 17), before midnight.
• Feb 11: Second batch of security slides has been posted in the Reading List.
• Feb 7: Test 2 with solutions has been posted below.
• Feb 2 (10:44pm): Simon Broadhead cracked the password; it is: d38a5703. In his words: I used the program ochHashcat-plus ( http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/) which is a GPU powered cracker that supports DES (it can do about 30 million ciphers per second on my GPU). I restricted it to the keyspace [0-9a-f] to start with since that's what the password for the reading list is, and it took 1 minute and 24 seconds to find the key.
• Feb 2: First batch of security slides have been posted.
• Jan 31: Test 2 is coming up on Monday February 6; the material to be covered for the test is the following:
  • Tom Leighton, Improving performance on the Internet, ACM 2009.
  • Rodrigo Rodrigues and Peter Druschel, Peer-to-Peer Systems, ACM 2010.
  • KPS: chapter 1, chapter 2, and sections 3.1,3.2,3.3 of chapter 3.
• Jan 26: The latest batch of slides has been posted in the "Reading List" section; test 1 with solutions has been posted below.
• Jan 19: I am using Google+ to post news, articles, jobs for students I hear about, etc. If you are interested please use this link (note that this is something I do to keep in touch with former and current students, to let them know about things of general interest related to computer science — it is not part of this course):

  https://plus.google.com/i/3njsWA-BYKU:hCqvjEtcR7M

• Jan 18: Test 1 will have 3 questions; the first question will be on the Isenberg article, the second question will be on the Vixie article, and the third question will be from the lecture notes given thus far (including today).
• Jan 18: Slides from today's lecture have been posted in the Reading List.
• Jan 17: Go to Reading List for articles related to the topics covered in the course. The login and password will be given in class.
• Jan 16: Assignment 1 (due Feb 17) has been posted below.
• Jan 13: On Thursday January 19th, during the normal lecture time, Robert Li will give a tutorial on the use of SVN. The repository for the course has been set up:

  https://websvn.mcmaster.ca/cs3c03-se4c03/“your macid”

• Jan 7: “Tutorial/labs/office hours” times have been posted above. Test and assignment dates have been posted below. Also note above that I have added a link to last year's version of this course.
• The Python official website from where you can download Python — check first if you already have it: on OS X, Linux or UNIX type python --version. We are going to use Python 2. You can download a manuscript of Python for software design by Allen B. Downey as a PDF or HTML for free.

Assignments and Tests:

Item	Due Date	PDF file	Comments
Test 1	January 23	t1.pdf
Test 2	February 6	t2.pdf
Assignment 1	February 17	a1.pdf	marking scheme
Test 3	March 5	t3.pdf
Test 4	March 26	t4.pdf
Assignment 2	March 30	a2.pdf