Resources

Piazza. The best way to ask a short question about the course materials is via Piazza, an online forum in which students ask (and answer) questions. Please do not email such questions to individual staff members; use Piazza. The course staff monitors this forum regularly.

Lecture slides will be made available after lecture on the Piazza resources page.

Office hours. For more substantial questions about the course materials, you should attend office hours.

Books. Here are some good books about security, in case you are interested.

• Ross J. Anderson, Security Engineering. 2nd Edition. 2008. [Covers security in general, with many non-computing examples.]
• Dieter Gollmann, Computer Security. 3rd Edition. 2011. [General security textbook. Good for what it covers, but doesn't cover everything.]
• David Kahn, The Codebreakers. 1996. [History of cryptography. Not very technical.]
• Steven Levy, Crypto. 2001. [History of cryptography since 1970. Non-technical.]
• Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, Practical Cryptography. 2003. [Focused coverage of applied cryptography, not the most rigorous.]
• John Viega and Gary McGraw, Building Secure Software. 2011. [How to write software that will have fewer security bugs.]
• Michal Zalewski, The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications. 2011. [Web security. Strikes a good balance between conceptual exposition and messy detail.]

Java. Assignments that use Java must use Java SE Development Kit 8 - also known as JDK 1.8. The assignments are not guaranteed to work on Java 9 and Java 10. To determine which version of Java is installed on your platform:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Execute the command: java -version
3. If you have JDK 1.8 installed, you will see output that contains messages with the string "version 1.8.0_161" (or similar).

See the Oracle website for download/installation instructions for your platform

If you need assistance installing JDK 1.8, see the undergraduate lab TAs in Lewis 121.

Wireshark. Wireshark is a network packet analysis tool and is available at https://www.wireshark.org.

Virtual Machines - Installation. Assignments 4, 5, and 6 require the use of the Kali Linux VM. Instructions can be here.

VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a hosted hypervisor for running operating systems (VMs) and is available at https://www.virtualbox.org

Kali Linux VM. Linux distribution used for penetration testing, ethical hacking, and network security assessments and is available at https://www.kali.org