OFFICE HOURS DURING SEMESTER

• Monday: 2:30 -- 3:30 pm (MC 384)
• Tuesday: 3:30 -- 4:30 pm (MC 384)
• Wednesday 12:30 -- 1:30 pm (MC 384)
• Friday 3:00 -- 4:00 pm (MC 384)

Most recent announcements are at top, older ones are further down the page.

• 30 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • `Trusted Computing' Frequently Asked Questions Version 1.1 (August 2003) Ross Anderson
  • Intel Whitepaper on Trusted Platform Module (TPM) based Security on Notebook PCs - White Paper (June 2002)
  • Trusted Computing Group's home page
  • Trusted Computing (wiki entry)
  • Trusted Computing Group (wiki entry)
• 27 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • What to Do When Your Security's Breached by Tim Wilson, (Site Editor, Dark Reading) and related Slashdot discussion of this article
• 22 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • Discussion of malware as a service industry arising from discovering a program that was intercepting SSL traffic before it got encrypted
  • Virtual Private Network
  • Crypto-anarchism
• 15 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • Introduction to SELinux (by Mick Bauer, Linux Journal)
  • SELinux (wikipedia)
  • Paranoid Penguin Columns from Linux Journal by Mick Bauer.
  • Black Hat (wikipedia)
  • DEF CON (Hacker Convention) (wikipedia)
• 14 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • Best Practices for Seizing Electronic Evidence (U S Secret Service note)
  • Digital Evidence in the Courtroom: A guide for law enforcement and prosecutors (National Institute of Justice -- The Research, Development, and Evaluation Agency of the U S Department of Justice)
• 12 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • Van Eck phreaking
  • XBox Linux
  • Blog by Andrew ``bunnie'' Huang, author of `Hacking the XBox'
  • Keeping Secrets in Hardware: The Microsoft XboxCase Study by Andrew Huang (CHES 2002).
  • Information Security: An Integrated Collection of Essays by Marshall D. Abrams, Sushil Jajodia, and Harold J. Podell (IEEE Press) (1995)
  • Building Secure Systems by Morrie Gasser (1988)
  • Java Security White Papers
  • Computer Security Archives Project (at UC Davis SecLab)
• 8 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • What is 6-trait Writing? (list of issues in writing quality relating to: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions) -- see also material at: InterActive Six Trait Writing Process and discussion in pdf file Rubrics
  • The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. (see also wikipedia entry)
• 7 Mar 2007: Added links to:
  • RSA
  • Public Key Cryptography
  • Elliptic Curve Cryptography
  • The Case for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (NSA)
  • Implementation Tutorial On ECC
  • List of Cryptographers
  • Quantum Cryptography
• 5 Mar 2007: Alphabetized wikipedia entries after separating them into a few basic categories.
• 5 Mar 2007: Added to course web page:
  • intrusion detection systems
  • SNORT (free software network intrusion detection and prevention system)
  • Cisco Security Agent
  • Tripwire software
  • Anomaly-based intruction detection system (references Symantice's Manhunt product and Lancope's StealthWatch)
  • Intruction Prevention System
  • DNS Backbone Denial of Service Attacks
  • Timeline of notable computer viruses and worms
  • SQL Slammer Worm
  • Morris Worm
  • DNS cache poisoning
  • DNS Security Extensions
  • Hard Reading Made Easy By Mortimer J. Adler.
  • How To Read A Difficult Book by Mortimer J. Adler.
  • How to Mark a Book By Mortimer J. Adler.
  • How to Keep Awake While Reading by Mortimer J. Adler.
  • Reading as Learning by Discovery by Mortimer J. Adler.
  • A Meeting of Minds by Mortimer J. Adler.
  • A Lesson in Criticism: Four questions to ask yourself when you are making up your mind about a book By Mortimer J. Adler.
  • Idling: Why It Is So Important Not To Be Busy All The Time by Mortimer J. Adler.
  • Article on Fall 2003 U of Calgary Course on Computer Viruses and Malware ( CPSC 527 Course Outline)
• 3 Mar 2007: Added to course web page:
  • Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory (by Peter Gutmann, 1996 USENIX Security Symposium)
• 16 Feb 2007: Drive-By Pharming Attack Could Hit Home Networks (Security researchers at Symantec Corp and Indiana University have figured out a way to compromise home networks using a single line of JavaScript in a web page.) [Computer Business Review Online]
• 15 Feb 2007: Start-up demos quantum computer (Canadian Company D-Wave demos 16-qubit quantum computer). See also First "Commercial" Quantum Computer Solves Sudoku Puzzles Scientific American writeup of demo. If successful, Quantum computers could efficiently do bruteforce search of encryption key spaces undoing most the techniques discussed this semester. [ D-Wave company web site]
• 15 Feb 2007: RFID 'Powder' - World's Smallest RFID Tag (Hitachi introduces RFID tags that are 1/20th of a millimeter in width -- width of human hair, contains 128-bit ROM for storing identification number).
• 14 Feb 2007: 'Storm Trojan' ignites worm war ComputerWorld article. Apparently systems hijaced by Peacomm worm have conducted denial of service attacks against sites used by creators of Warezov worm (which is associated with rise in spam at end of 2006).
• 14 Feb 2007: Added links to Wikipedia entries:
  • Conway's Game of Life
  • Random number generator
  • Random number generation
  • RC 4
  • linear feedback shift register
  • stream cipher
  • Cellular automata
  • block cipher
  • DES
  • Differential Cryptanalysis
  • Linear Cryptanalysis
  • AES
  • Piling Up Lemma (linear cryptanalysis)
  • Integral cryptanalysis
  • Triple DES
• 12 Feb 2007: Office hours changed as per discussion last week (Thursday cancelled, new hour on Friday added).
• 6 Feb 2007: Added links to:
  • Traffic Analysis
  • Timing Attacks
  • Man in the middle attack
  • Side channel attack
  • Covert channel
  • DNS cache poisoning
  • Zero Day Attack
  • Shatter Attack
  • SQL injection
• 6 Feb 2007: Researchers devise chip and PIN crack shows one way to compromise security of `smart' cards.
• 2 Feb 2007: An interesting article in IEEE Computer Reengineering the internet for better security by Manoj Parameswaran; Xia Zhao; Whinston, A.B.; Fang Fang
• 2 Feb 2007: The current issue of Communications of the ACM has the articles IT security: in search of the Holy Grail and Widespread network failures
• 2 Feb 2007: Added links to:
  • Dark Reading (computer security news service)
  • transposition cipher
• 31 Jan 2007: Added links to:
  • Special Issue on Emerging Technologies for Homeland Security Communications of the ACM; Volume 47, Issue 3 (March 2004)
  • David Wagner's papers
  • Ian Goldberg's papers
  • Bruce Schneier's papers
• 30 Jan 2007: article on widespread Internet monitoring by FBI and slashdot article on cracking of Vista DRM technology. Also of interest might be a bunch of slashdot security-related articles. Dumb Terminals' Can Be a Smart Move discusses the advantages of getting rid of desktop and laptop machines in a business environment.
• 29 Jan 2007: An error was found in the vigenere.gawk code that was used for last Friday's emailing. It has been fixed, I think. The problems emailed out Friday have been re-emailed with the proper encoding. The error in the gawk code was that it was using mod 27 rather than mod 26 in its calculations. One noticiable effect this had in retrospect was that it meant that some of the characters in a group of 5 were replaced with the null character, so the problem that was emailed was in irregular character groupings. Now that the problem has been fixed, the emailed new problem should be in the standard format of groups of 5 characters separated by spaces (8 groups to a line).
• 26 Jan 2007: Added a link to How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. [A great overview of how to critically read serious writing. Also see reviews at amazon.com on How To Read A Book.]
• 26 Jan 2007: A few items of note:
  • Testing Commercial 2-Factor Authentication Systems? (slashdot article, see discussion at end of it)
  • A Stand Against Wikipedia (History department at Middlebury College ``voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work''. Article discusses pros and cons of this idea.)
  • Tax Takers Send in the Spiders (from Wired News on the Canadian government monitoring eCommerce for tax enforcement purposes)
  • 50% movie piracy from Canada: Hollywood (25 Jan 2007 CanWest News Service)
• 25 Jan 2007: New links added to course page for:
  • crypto authors' sites (home pages and publication lists for many researchers in cryptography/computer security).
  • Cipher Electronic Newsletter of the Technical Commitee on Security & Privacy; A Technical Committee of the Computer Society of the IEEE
• 24 Jan 2007: New links added to:
  • Vigenere Cipher
  • Playfair Cipher
  • Computer Security Division National Institute of Standards and Technology (US).
  • NIST's Plan for New Cryptographic Hash Functions contains links relating to workshop reports, policy changes to abandon SHA-1, and starting a competition for designing a replacement for the SHA-2 family of hash functions.
  • circa 2001 information relating to the NIST backed AES design competition
  • NIST Security Publications collections
  Note: the NIST security publications ranges over a lot of stuff including standards and recommendations across the board to research conducted under NIST backing and also useful publications that other people have submitted to their collection on topics as varied as the economic impact of DES, the social organization of the computer underground, forming an incident response team, computer security issues at Concordia circa 1998, ... They also have a separate collection of just important historical papers (many unpublished) on computer security issues going back to the 70s.

  Both the Vigenere and Playfair wikipedia entries involve cryptanalysis discussion as well as links to more on same.

• 23 Jan 2007: People interested in network security may want to read Security Focus's interview with Bill Cheswick. Although generally optimistic, in three pages, a number of interesting comments about the state of network security are made.
• 23 Jan 2007: Slashdot article on cracking protection on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
• 23 Jan 2007: Poking around on the web, I ran into the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner presentation mentioning
  • CIBC sending misdirected faxes to West Virginia scrap yard dating back to Feb 2002 including confidential customer information.
  • 180,000 Mastercard records stolen from HSBC in Jan 2005,
  • 16.3 million records illegally accessed at T-Mobile in Jan 2005
  And now more recently we have Talvest Mutual Funds issues statement regarding missing back up computer file (Talvest Mutual Funds is managed by CIBC. 470,000 current and former client information went missing while in transit.)
• 22 Jan 2007: FYI, Swedish bank hit by 'biggest ever' online heist
• 22 Jan 2007: Added a link to:
  • Alan Turing papers relating to cryptography (recently declassified documents relating to Turing's work breaking the Enigma cipher as well as the work of his colleagues on the German Tunny cipher which lead to Colossus -- the first useful computer).
• 19 Jan 2007: For people trying to figure out the scope of Computer Security as a topic, Topics of Interest for the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) gives a good overview of the field.
• 19 Jan 2007: Both the Spillman and the Dawson books are on reserve in Taylor now (and probably earlier, but I just now noticed). See links:
  • Classical and contemporary cryptology by Richard J. Spillman.
  • The essence of computing projects : a student's guide by Christian W. Dawson.
• 18 Jan 2007: Links added to course web page for:
  • Enigma Machine
  • Enigma Rotor Details
  • Cryptanalysis of Enigma
• 16 Jan 2007: Links added to course web page for:
  • Sun Microsystems Labs
  • Sun Innovation Blog
  • Solaris 10 Security site
  • Darren Moffit Security Blog (Sun)
  • Glenn Faden -- Trusted Blogger (Sun)
  • Glenn Brunett Security Blog (Sun)
  • Sun's Whitfield Diffie on ECC and Solaris 10 OS security (Sun Inner Circle Newsletter -- ECC = elliptic curve cryptography)
  Note: regarding the last link: Whitfield Diffie was one of the inventors of the idea of trapdoor encryption functions that started off the whole public key encryption methods. He is currently Chief Security Officier at Sun.
• 15 Jan 2007: Just finished emailing out the homework 1 assignments to the email addresses provided in class today. The subject line was cs413 h1. The message starts with a general discussion of how to hand in the assignment and the format of the assignment's report. After that is the cryptanalysis problem that you have been given. Everyone has been sent a different piece of text encrypted using the scramble.gawk program from last Friday's handout. Each piece of text was encrypted with a different key. Enjoy. If you have questions, Wednesday's class and next Monday's class are two good time to clarify any outstanding issues, so try and get started on it as soon as you can.
• 13 Jan 2007: More links added to course web page:
  • frequency analysis (wiki)
  • index of coincidence (wiki)
  • Statistical Distributions of English Text
  • Here is some statistical information that is helpful when trying to solve cryptograms
  • CryptTool (so far, only available under Windows)
  • EverCrack (Windows and Linux)
  • web page contains link to zipped pdf files for US Army Field Manual 34-40-2, Basic Cryptanalysis chpts 2 and 3 contains discussion of cracking substition ciphers, Appendices A, B, and C give frequency stats for english digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs.
  • Project planning
  • Project management software
  • Task Juggler
  • Gantt Chart
  • Gantt Project
• 13 Jan 2007: Office hours announced.
• 12 Jan 2007: Added link to Citeseer under general comp sci with some security link. Citeseer, like ACM Digital Library, is useful because it links to people who cited the article you are looking at as well as people the article cited. It has the added advantage of being available off campus without special connections (like scholar google).
• 12 Jan 2007: Created a section for companies that focus on computer security and government sites focussed on these topics. Also added to web page a link for CERIAS Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, a link to EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law, a link to Biometrics Research at Michigan State University, a link to IT Security.com, and a link to Security Stats.com.
• 11 Jan 2007: The Spillman book is now in the library on reserve (the card catalog entry indicates it is a 2 hour loan). The Dawson book is not yet in. See the following links:
  • Classical and contemporary cryptology by Richard J. Spillman.
  • The essence of computing projects : a student's guide by Christian W. Dawson.
• 11 Jan 2007: Just added two more files to /gaul/u0/usr/faculty/webber/CS413, descramble.gawk which does the same sort of thing as scramble.gawk, but instead of reading from a file of numbers named key, it reads from a file of letter pairs named unkey. A sample unkey file is also shown. The first 25 lines of unkey are read and the first value in a line is used as an array index (in awk, strings can be array indices) and the second value is the value to store at that index, thus establishing what character to change the first value into. For example, the file:

  a  r
  b  _
  c  h
  d  _
  e  _
  f  a
  g  e
  h  _
  i  _
  k  _
  l  s
  m  _
  n  i
  o  _
  p  _
  q  o
  r  _
  s  _
  t  n
  u  _
  v  _
  w  t
  x  _
  y  _
  z  _
  

  guesses based just on frequency the values that correspond to the letters etaonishr in a4 and the unknowns just get replaced by an underscore. This seems to be an improvement over the previous interface, but probably still not as nice as the CAP program.
• 11 Jan 2007: I recently got email from someone thinking in terms of implementing some sort of security system. This raises the question of what is a reasonable way of doing such an implementation (as well as questions regarding how to evaluate such an implementation). An interesting article to start thinking about how one designs such systems is: Information systems security design methods: implications for information systems development by Richard Baskerville (ACM Computing Surveys, 1994) which I am adding to the course web page. A more recent paper on general security issues in software design Matching attack patterns to security vulnerabilities in software-intensive system designs by Michael Gegick and Laurie Williams (ACM 2005) relates these matters to `attack trees' which are discussed at the end of the Schneier textbook (and has also been added to the course web page). One can find a lot of similar papers by searching for the key "security system design" in the ACM digital library. Indeed, there is even an interesting Wikipedia entry (added) on the topic under secure by design.
• 10 Jan 2007: Just added to /gaul/u0/usr/faculty/webber/CS413 the scripts digram.gawk and trigram.gawk for computing digram and trigram statistics (which can then be ordered by sort -nr +1). Also included are the files a4.digram.sorted and a4.trigram.sorted that show the corresponding digram and trigram statistics for the a4 text. By the way, the script scramble.gawk can also be used for testing possible substitutions. The format of the file key that scramble.gawk reads is just a list of 25 numbers (1 per line). The number 7 appearing in the third line would indicate that the third letter (c) should be substituted by the seventh letter (g) to be encoded. But one could also build a key that decoded the message by placing the value 3 in the seventh line to indicate that the seventh letter (g) should be replaced by the third letter (c) to recover the message. One can then use the statistics information in Useful English Language Statistics (mentioned in an earlier announcement) to make `educated guesses' about which letters to try from the single letter, bigram, and trigram frequency data. Presumably the CAP interface is more friendly and for that matter, there are probably better ways to organize the script for testing decodings, but this would still be better than doing it by pencil and paper (as people used to do these things). Enjoy.
• 10 Jan 2007: SANS Top-20 Internet Security Attack Targets (2006 Annual Update) added to course web page.
• 10 Jan 2007: Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says (CBC News January 10, 2007)
• 10 Jan 2007: Added
  • Kevin's Word List Page
  • Useful English Language Statistics
  • bigram (digrams) [Wiki]
  • trigrams [Wiki]
  • n-grams [Wiki]
  • Prediction and entropy in printed English by Claude Shannon (circa 1951 paper on a Machine Learning course web site)
  • Modern optimisation algorithms for cryptanalysis by Andrew Clark (IEEE, 1994)
  • Genetic Algorithms in Cryptography by Bethany Delman M.S. Thesis, July 2004, Rochester Institute of Technology
  to the course web page. From one of Kevin's links, I picked up the file of 57,000 UK English words with frequency information. A copy of this particular file can be found in the /gaul/u0/usr/faculty/webber/CS413/wlist directory. The category 16 words (the most commonly used) includes 3219 words. The language stats link includes digram frequencies, most popular trigrams, and digram frequencies presented as `contact frequencies' (i.e., what is the probability of a particular letter coming immediately before the letter B or immediately after the letter G, etc.) From my reading of Chapter 2, I would assume that a lot of this sort of information is buried inside the CAP program. The Wiki article on n-grams shows that this stuff is used more generally in computational linguistics and is not just about cryptography. The Shannon paper discusses how the number of bits of information in 26 character text would normally be 4.7 bits. If you take into account frequency, it drops to 4.14 bits per letter. Digram information pushes it down to 3.56 bits per letter. Trigram information pushes it down to 3.3 bits per letter. So, while just plain letter frequencies help, digram and trigram info helps quite a bit too.
• 10 Jan 2007: You might find the following talk interesting as it is basically a report on spending a semester reading on a particular topic in computer science (a larger task than your proposal is aimed at, but something in the general direction of what these things are like).

  READING COURSE PRESENTATION
  
          Ryan Demopoulos
  
          DATE:           Friday, January 12, 2007
  
          TIME:           2:30 p.m.
  
          PLACE:          MC 320
  
          SUPERVISOR:     Dr.  Michael Katchabaw
  
  Music information retrieval (MIR) is the process of extracting various 
  types of information from musical passages.  The automation of this process 
  requires knowledge from several disciplines, such as music theory, 
  linguistics, and computational sciences.  Music is (arguably) more complex 
  than text, and is comprised of many facets working together 
  simultaneously.  Due to this complexity, the process of extracting data 
  usually occurs on a feature-by-feature basis; a feature tracks one of the 
  many aspects of music, such as rhythm, pitch, or global features such as 
  time and key signatures.  This presentation will introduce several areas of 
  study that constitute MIR as a whole; specifically, topics in musical 
  representation, automatic transcription, query capture issues, pattern 
  matching, and pattern induction will be explored.
  

  I expect some of you might be wondering what music has to do with computer security. Typing "music computer security" into scholar.google.com actually turned up a few hits from the published literature:
  • "What is computer security?" by M Bishop regarding inforcing policies forbidding students to store music files on a system.
  • "Computer security in the real world" by B. W. Lampson which raises it as an example of maintaining intellectual property rights
  • "Information hiding - a survey" by F. A. P Petitcolas, et al and "Information hiding: steganography and watermarking--attacks and countermeasures" which presumably talk about hiding messages in music files as well as hiding owner identification information in music files for later proof of where it was stolen from.
  • "Secure online music distribution system" which was US Patent 6,385,596, 2002
  • and a bunch of other hits.
  Scholar Google claims 39,000 hits on this `topic', although I don't particularly expect the above talk to touch on these matters.
• 10 Jan 2007: The files in today's handout are on gaul in the directory /gaul/u0/usr/faculty/webber/CS413:
  • a1: sample piece of text with spaces and punctuation removed
  • a1.data: frequency data for a1
  • a2: sample piece of text where every fifth letter has been removed (removed letters were replaced with _)
  • a3: sample piece of text where a random number generator was used to determine (with a one in five chance) which letters to remove. (removed letters were replaced with _)
  • a4: a sample piece of text encrypted using a monoalphabetic substitution cipher (see chpt 2 of Spillman text).
  • a4.data: frequency data for a4
  • everyfifth.gawk: gawk script that produced a2
  • freq.gawk: gawk script that produced frequency data
  • package.gawk: gawk script that produced a1
  • randomfifth.gawk: gawk script that produced a3
  • scramble.gawk: gawk script that produced a4
  • split.gawk: an gawk script for breaking a large text file into smaller parts (sort of my own version of csplit).
• 8 Jan 2007: Added new section at bottom of course web page for interesting course-related Wikipedia entries.
• 8 Jan 2007: Added the following links to course web page:
  • CAP software web page (by Spillman, author of Classical and Contemporary Cryptology)
  • interesting links (by Spillman, author of Classical and Contemporary Cryptology)
  • Steven Bellovin's publications on computer security
  • Links on Law, Cryptography and Electronic Communications
  • Ronald L. Rivest: publications and talks
  • Ron Rivest's collection of links on Cryptography and Security
  • Cryptography and Information Security Group at MIT (links to theses and publications)
  • Electronic Frontier Canada
  • Microsoft's Cryptography Group
  • IBM's Cryptography Research Group
  • Security and Cryptography at UCSD
  • UCL Crypto Group (Microelectronics Laboratory)
  • NYU Cryptography Group
  • UC Davis Cryptography Group
  • UC Davis Computer Security Laboratory
  • Matt Bishop's publications
  • Security Lab at Stanford University
  • Applied Cryptography Group at Stanford
  • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy group at University of Waterloo
  • University of Virginia Computer Security Reading Group
  • International Journal of Digital Evidence (IJDE)
  • Digital Forensic Research WOrkshop Archives
  • CERT (CMU center for internet secuirity expertise)
  • Computer Security News
• 8 Jan 2007: Checked in library about course books on reserve. They are in the process of recalling the Spillman Cryptography book (plenty of copies in bookstore) and Essence of Computing Projects book. You can check on the status of the recall by checking out the following UWO card catalog links
  • Classical and contemporary cryptology by Richard J. Spillman.
  • The essence of computing projects : a student's guide by Christian W. Dawson.
  I have asked the library to put them on 1 day check out.
• 8 Jan 2007: Course outline on line.
• 8 Jan 2007: Created announcements page.

I can be contacted by email at webber@csd.uwo.ca . Be sure and include course number in subject line of your email.