Course Schedule
A (tentative) schedule for the semester:
| Week | Date | Topic | Readings | Assignments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 08/24 | Logistics, Security Mindset, and Software Security Basics (Permission, Set-UID, and Environment Variables). | Chapter 1 & 2 of SEED book | |
| 2 | 08/31 | Software Security: Control Flow Hijacking; Write Shellcode. | Chapter 4 of SEED | |
| 3 | 09/07 | Software Security: Code Reuse Attacks and ROP. ⚡ GenAI thread: AI as a security co-pilot — and as a new attack surface. | Chapter 5 of SEED | |
| 4 | 09/14 | Software Security: Control-Flow Integrity, Stack Canaries, and ASLR. | ||
| 5 | 09/21 | Software Security: Vulnerability Discovery (Fuzzing and Symbolic Execution). ⚡ GenAI thread: AI-assisted fuzzing — LLM-guided harness/seed generation and crash triage. |
Final Project Proposal (Due: TBD) |
|
| 6 | 09/28 | Software Security: Format String Vulnerabilities, Reverse Shell. | Chapter 6 & 9 of SEED | |
| 7 | 10/05 | Software Security: Race Conditions (TOCTOU) and Integer Overflows; Midterm Review. ⚡ GenAI thread: why concurrency bugs slip past fuzzers and LLM code review. | ||
| 8 | 10/12 | Software Security: Heap Exploits; Memory-Safe Languages & Rust (the post-memory-safety era); Midterm Exam (Oct 15). | ||
| 9 | 10/19 | Software Security: Malware; Crypto: Crypto Basics, Hash Function, Symmetric-Key Encryption. | ||
| 10 | 10/26 | Crypto: Encryption Mode, Padding, Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, Public-Key Encryption. | ||
| 11 | 11/02 | Crypto: RSA, Public-Key Infrastructure, CA, Digital Certificate (X.509). | ||
| 12 | 11/09 | Systems Security: Authentication, Password, and Access Control; Network Security: IDS, Firewalls, IPSec, TCP/UDP layer security, TLS. | ||
| 13 | 11/16 | Systems Security: OS Security; Side-Channels and CPU Vulnerabilities (Meltdown/Spectre). ⚡ GenAI thread: ML/LLM-accelerated side-channel analysis. | ||
| 14 | 11/23 | 🤖 AI & Security (Capstone): AI-for-Security — LLM-assisted vulnerability discovery, AI fuzzing, automated patching, LLM-aided reverse engineering; Security-for-AI — OWASP LLM Top 10, direct/indirect prompt injection, jailbreaks, data/model poisoning, RAG & agent/MCP security, and defenses. (Thanksgiving Nov 26 — no Thursday class.) | OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) | |
| 15 | 11/30 | Final Project Presentations. |
Final Project Report & Presentation (Due: ) |