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.

For instructions on reviewing papers, see here.

Literature Review

To help you write a literature review or the background of a research paper, read the following:

• Harvey, "What Is a Literature Review?" (DOC) (PPT)
• Taylor, "The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It"

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)

Adaptive Security 2020F Lecture 3|September 17, 2020

• Tom Ray, Tierra (1992): Pixelated but with Figures, Clearer Text
• Choosing a Project

September 22, 2020

• Neti, "Software diversity: Security, Entropy, and Game Theory." (HotSec 2012)
• Foster, "Object-Level Recombination of Commodity Applications." (GECCO 2010)

September 24, 2020

• Oda, "Content Provider Conflict on the Modern Web." (ASIA 2008)
• Oda, "Visual Security Policy for the Web." (HotSec 2010)

September 29, 2020

• Forrest, "A Sense of Self for Unix Processes." (Oakland 1996)
• Somayaji, "Automated Response Using System-Call Delays." (USENIX Security 2000)

October 1, 2020

• Matrawy, "Mitigating Network Denial-of-Service Through Diversity-Based Traffic Management." (ACNS 2005)
• Hijazi, "Discovering Packet Structure through Lightweight Hierarchical Clustering." (ICC 2008)

October 6, 2020

• Somayaji, "Evaluating Security Products with Clinical Trials." (CSET 2009)
• Lévesque, "A clinical study of risk factors related to malware infections." (CCS 2013)

October 8, 2020

• Wagner & Soto, "Mimicry attacks on host-based intrusion detection systems." (CCS 2002)
• Wagner & Dean, "Intrusion detection via static analysis." (Oakland 2001)
• Forrest, "The Evolution of System-call Monitoring." (ACSAC 2008)

October 13, 15, & 20, 2020

Review two papers per class following this template. Post your reviews on the Readings Wiki on Teams (in the Readings channel).

October 22, 2020

• Findlay, "bpfbox: Simple Precise Process Confinement in eBPF." (CCSW 2020)
• Chao, "Information Immune Systems." (Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 2003)

November 3, 2020

Look at the papers in the USENIX Security 2000 and USENIX Security 2010 as compared to the papers in USENIX Security 2020.

• How have the kinds of papers changed over the years?
• How has the ratio of attack to defence papers changed?
• Has the "practicality" of papers changed?

November 17, 2020

• Carver, "Establishing a baseline for measuring advancement in the science of security: an analysis of the 2015 IEEE security & privacy proceedings." (HotSoS 2016)
• Burcham, "Characterizing scientific reporting in security literature: An analysis of ACM CCS and IEEE S&P papers." (HotSoS 2017)

November 19, 2020

• Tan & Maxion, "'Why 6?': Defining the Operational Limits of stide, an Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detector." (Oakland 2002)
• Sekar,"A Fast Automaton-Based Method for Detecting Anomalous Program Behaviors." (Oakland 2001)

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 November 2, 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 from Feb. 20, 2004 at the University of Massachusetts, book review by Axel Meyer

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.