Advanced Topics in Computer Security

Synthetic program:

We will focus on open research challenges and themes, to transmit a) the research methods of the field of computer security b) the existing threats and attack methodologies and c) the open research challenges. The course will deal with most of the cutting edge research challenges in designing a secure system, ranging from application-level security to host and network security. The topics we will talk about are: - Attacker goals and motivations and the economics of cybercrime - Software vulnerabilities and their (automated) detection - Large-scale analysis of security data (i.e. data science applications to security data) - Malware analysis and computer virology (theoretical and practical) - Hardware and embedded systems security with a particular focus this year on cyberphysical systems - Cyberwarfare and cyberdefense, including the ethical problems of dual-use technologies - Protection of critical infrastructures At the end of the course, the students will know: - the general "map" of the systems security research area, the research directions and some of the key recent results - the methodologies used in systems security research, and have seen examples of their application to current research issues - the common pitfalls in security research and the ways to properly assess research results, figure out limitations and propose independently new areas to explore