Adaptive Security (Fall 2020)

Course Outline

The outline for the Fall 2020 run of Adaptive Security is available here.

Zoom link info is in cuLearn. If you can't access it, please email anilsomayaji at cunet.carleton.ca!

Research Journal

Your research journal is due by 9 PM the night before class. If you need more time please message me (on Teams) that you are running late. Entries are graded out of 4. Make sure to date stamp your entries. You may have multiple entries between classes; I will look at all entries since the last class.

Class Schedule

September 10, 2020

Introduction

September 15, 2020

• A. K. Dewdney, Core Wars (local copy)
  • In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits. (Scientific American, May 1984)
  • A Core War bestiary of viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories (Sciencific American, March 1985)
  • A program called MICE nibbles its way to victory at the first Core War tournament (Scientific American, January 1987)
  • Of worms, viruses and Core War (Scientific American, March 1989)

September 17, 2020

• Tom Ray, Tierra (1992)

December 8, 2020

Presentations 1

December 10, 2020

Presentations 2

Project Milestones

• September 18, 2020: Areas of interest
• September 29, 2020: Elevator Pitch
• October 23, 2020: Literature Review
• November 17, 2020: Tests/Preliminary Work

Other Readings

Here are some optional readings, most with a more biological bent:

• Somayaji, "How to Win an Evolutionary Arms Race." (IEEE S&P, Nov-Dec 2004)
• Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species (Basic Books, 2002-2008): Google Books, Talk on YouTube

Note that some of the content of this course came from a previous course, Biological Approaches to Computer Security:

• Winter 2004
• Winter 2005

The focus of this class will be on designing and building actual defenses so we won't cover many of these readings. However, you may want to take a look at them for inspiration.