Readings
Paper Responses
Write a short response to each required paper.
- In the first paragraph:
- State the problem that the paper tries to solve; and
- Summarize the main contributions.
- In one or more additional paragraphs:
- Evaluate the paper's strengths and weaknesses;
- Discuss something you would have done differently if you wrote the paper; and
- Suggest at least two interesting open problems on related topics.
- Finally, list any areas you had trouble understanding. I'll try to explain them in class.
Your most important task is to demonstrate that you've read the paper and thought carefully about the topic.
Your responses should be no longer than ~400 words per paper.
Paper responses are due before the start of class. Email your responses to . Paste the text of your responses into the body of the message (no attachments, please!), and use the subject line [reading588].
Reading List
This list is subject to change. Updates will be posted by the end of the day on the Friday before each lecture.
Unfortunately, some articles require paid subscriptions to journals and digital libraries. You can access these for free when connecting on campus. For off-campus access, try the U-M VPN or the MLibrary Proxy Server Bookmarklet.
Essential Crypto
Tuesday, January 15 No written response required for today.
Thursday, January 17 No written response required for today.
When Crypto Fails
Tuesday, January 22
- MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday. Dan Kaminsky. 2004.
- MD5 Considered Harmful Today. Sotirov, Stevens, Appelbaum, Lenstra, Molnar, Osvik, and Weger. CCC 2008.
- Public Key Distribution and Certificates and TLS and SSL. D. Koren, et al. Secure Networking Protocols Portal, 2009.
- RFC 2246: TLS Protocol v1.0, 1999 and RFC 5246: TLS Protocol v1.2, 2008.
Thursday, January 24
- Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software. Peter Gutmann. USENIX Security 2002.
- Mining Your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices. Heninger, Durumeric, Wustrow, and Halderman. USENIX Security 2012.
- Why Cryptosystems Fail. Ross Anderson. Commun. ACM, 37(11), Nov. 1994.
- Cryptanalytic Attacks on Pseudorandom Number Generators. Kelsey, Schneier, Wagner, and Hall. FSE 1998.
- Cryptanalysis of the Windows Random Number Generator. Dorrendorf, Gutterman, and Pinkas. CCS 2007.
Attacking Software
Tuesday, January 29
- Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit. Aleph One. Phrack 49(14), Nov. 1996.
- Beyond Stack Smashing: Recent Advances in Exploiting Buffer Overruns. Pincus and Baker. IEEE Security and Privacy, July–Aug. 2004.
- English Shellcode. Mason, Small, Monrose, and MacManus. CCS 2009.
- Nozzle: A Defense Against Heap-spraying Code Injection Attacks. Ratanaworabhan, Livshits, and Zorn. 2008.
Thursday, January 31
- On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization. Shacham, Page, Pfaff, Goh, Modadugu, and Boneh. CCS 2004.
- The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone: Return-into-libc without Function Calls (on the x86). Hovav Shacham. CCS 2007.
- VUPEN Vulnerability Research Blog. (Details of advanced modern exploitation.)
- When Good Instructions Go Bad: Generalizing Return-Oriented Programming to RISC. Buchanan, Roemer, Shacham, and Savage. CCS 2008.
Defending Software
Tuesday, February 5
- Reflections on Trusting Trust. Ken Thompson. Communications of the ACM, 27(8), Aug. 1984.
- Towards Automatic Generation of Vulnerability-Based Signatures. Brumley, Newsome, Song, Wang, and Jha. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2006.
Thursday, February 7
- Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code. Yee, Sehr, Dardyk, Chen, Muth, Ormandy, Okasaka, Narula, and Fullagar. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2009.
- CloudAV: N-Version Antivirus in the Network Cloud. Oberheide, Cooke, and Jahanian. USENIX Security 2008.
- Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Applications on the Web. Douceur, Elson, Howell, and Lorch. OSDI 2008.
- Safe Kernel Extensions Without Run-Time Checking. Necula and Lee. OSDI 1996.
Web Security I
Tuesday, February 12
- Blueprint: Robust Prevention of Cross-site Scripting Attacks for Existing Browsers. Louw and Venkatakrishnan. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2009.
- Robust Defenses for Cross-Site Request Forgery. Barth, Jackson, and Mitchell. CSS 2008.
- Protection and Communication Abstractions for Web Browsers in MashupOS. Wang, Fan, Howell, and Jackson. SOSP 2007.
- Securing Browser Frame Communication. Barth, Jackson, and Mitchell. USENIX Security 2008.
- Enemy of the State: A State-Aware Black-Box Web Vulnerability Scanner. Doupe, Cavedon, Kruegel, and Vigna. USENIX Security 2012.
Thursday, February 14
- Clickjacking: Attacks and Defenses. Huang, Moshchuk, Wang, Schechter, and Jackson. USENIX Security 2012.
- Beware of Finer-Grained Origins. Jackson and Barth. Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2008.
- Protecting Browsers from DNS Rebinding Attacks. Jackson, Barth, Bortz, Shao, And Boneh. CCS 2007.
- Cross-Origin JavaScript Capability Leaks: Detection, Exploitation, and Defense. Barth, Weinberger, and Song. USENIX Security 2009.
Web Security II
Tuesday, February 19
- reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures. von Ahn, Maurer, McMillen, Abraham, and Blum. Science, September 2008.
- An Analysis of Private Browsing Modes in Modern Browsers. Aggarwal, Bursztein, Jackson, and Boneh. USENIX Security 2010.
- Games with a Purpose. Luis von Ahn. CACM, August 2008.
- Sketcha: A Captcha Based on Line Drawings of 3D Models. S. Ross, J. A. Halderman, and A. Finkelstein. WWW 2010.
- Adnostic: Privacy Preserving Targeted Advertising. Toubiana, Narayanan, Boneh, Nissenbaum, and Barocas. NDSS 2010.
Thursday, February 21
- The Science of Guessing: Analyzing an Anonymized Corpus of 70 Million Passwords. Joseph Bonneau. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2012.
- So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users. Cormac Herley. NSPW 2009.
- Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. Whitten and Tygar. USENIX Security 1999.
- The Security Architecture of the Chromium Browser. Barth, Jackson, Reis, and The Google Chrome Team. 2008.
- Why Information Security is Hard – An Economic Perspective. Ross Anderson. ACSAC 2001.
Web and Mobile Security
Tuesday, February 26
- Android Permissions Demystified. Felt, Chin, Hanna, Song, and Wagner. CCS 2011.
- You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Exposing Network Location for Targeted DoS Attacks in Cellular Networks. Z. Qian, Z. Wang, Q. Xu, Z. Mao, M. Zhang, and Y.-M. Wang. NDSS 2012.
- How to Ask for Permission. Felt, Egelman, Finifter, Akhawe, and Wagner. HotSec 2012.
- Android Permissions: User Attention, Comprehension, and Behavior. Felt, Ha, Egelman, Haney, Chin, and Wagner. SOUPS 2012.
- Smart-Phone Attacks and Defenses. Guo, Wang, and Zhu. HotNets 2004.
Thursday, February 28
- The Most Dangerous Code in the World: Validating SSL Certificates in Non-Browser Software. Georgiev, Iyengar, Jana, Anubhai, Boneh, and Shamatikov. CCS 2012.
- Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study of SSL Warning Effectiveness. Sunshine, Egelman, Almuhimedi, Atri, and Cranor. USENIX Security 2009.
- ForceHTTPS Cookies: A Defense Against Eavesdropping and Pharming. Jackson and Barth. WWW 2008.
- RFID Security and Privacy: A Research Survey. Juels. Journal of Selected Areas in Communication 2006.
Network Security I
Tuesday, March 12
- A Look Back at “Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite.” Steve Bellovin. ACSAC 2004.
- Blind TCP/IP Hijacking is Still Alive. lkm. Phrack 64, 2007.
- A Survey of BGP Security Issues and Solutions. Butler, Farley, McDaniel, and Rexford. 2008.
- Black Ops 2008: It's the End of the Cache as We Know It. Kaminsky. Toorcon 2008 (slides).
- Increased DNS Forgery Resistance Through 0x20-Bit Encoding. Dagon, Antonakakis, Vixie, Jinmei, and Lee. CCS 2008.
Thursday, March 14
- Inside the Slammer Worm. Moore, Paxson, Savage, Shannon, Staniford, and Weaver. IEEE Security and Privacy, July/August 2003.
- Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting. Kohno, Broido, and Claffy. Oakland 2005.
- Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time. Paxson. Computer Networks 31(23-24), 1999.
- Peeping Tom in the Neighborhood: Keystroke Eavesdropping on Multi-User Systems. Zhang and Wang. Usenix Security 2009.
Network Security II
Tuesday, March 19
- APT1 Report. Mandiant tech report. 2013.
- W32.Stuxnet Dossier. Falliere, Murchu, and Chien. Symantec Tech Report, 2011.
Thursday, March 21
- Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion. Kanich, Kreibich, Levchenko, Enright, Voelker, Paxson, and Savage. CCS 2008.
- Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover. Stone-Gross, Cova, Cavallaro, Gilbert, Szydlowski, Kemmerer, Kruegel, and Vigna. CCS 2009.
- A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon. Rajab, Zarfoss, Monrose, and Terzis. ISC 2006.
- What’s Clicking What? Techniques and Innovations of Today’s Clickbots. Miller, Pearce, Grier, Kreibich, and Paxson. DIMVA 2011.
Advanced Topics I
Tuesday, March 26 — Information Leakage
- Shredding Your Garbage: Reducing Data Lifetime Through Secure Deallocation. Chow, Pfaff, Garfinkel, and Rosenblum. USENIX Security 2005.
- Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys. Halderman, Schoen, Heninger, Clarkson, Paul, Calandrino, Feldman, Appelbaum, and Felten. USENIX Security 2008.
- BootJacker: Compromising Computers Using Forced Restarts. Chan, Carlyle, David, Farivar, and Campbell. CCS 2008.
- Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits. Heninger and Shacham. Crypto 2009.
- Keyboards and Covert Channels. Shah, Molina, and Blaze. USENIX Security 2006.
- Spot me if you can: Uncovering spoken phrases in encrypted VoIP conversations. Wright, Ballard, Coull, Monrose, and Masson. Oakland 2008.
Thursday, March 28 — Public Policy
- The Generative Internet. Zittrain. Harvard Law Review, 2006.
- Internet Clean-Slate Design: What and Why? Feldmann. 2007.
Security and Society
Tuesday, April 2 — Embedded Sec
- Designing and Implementing Malicious Hardware. King, Tucek, Cozzie, Grier, Jiang, and Zhou. LEET 2008.
- Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces. Checkoway, McCoy, Kantor, Anderson, Shacham, Savage, Koscher, Czeskis, Roesner, Kohno. USENIX Security 2011.
- Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile. Koscher, Czeskis, Roesner, Patel, Kohno, Checkoway, McCoy, Kantor, Anderson, Shacham, Savage. Oakland 2010.
- The ten-page Introduction to Trusted Computing. Martin. 2008.
- Building the IBM 4758 Secure Coprocessor. Dyer, Lnidermann, Perez, Sailer, van Doorn, Smith, and Weingart. IEEE Computer, Oct. 2001.
- Reverse-Engineering a Cryptographic RFID Tag. Nohl, Evans, Starbug, and Plotz. USENIX Security 2008.
- Cloaker: Hardware Supported Rootkit Concealment. David, Chan, Carlyle, and Campbell. Oakland 2008.
Thursday, April 4 — Securing Democracy
- Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines. Wolchok, Wustrow, Halderman, Prasad, Kankipati, Sakhamuri, Yagati, and Gonggrijp. CCS 2010.
- Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System. Wustrow, Wolchok, Isabel, and Halderman. FC 2012.
- Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. Feldman, Halderman, and Felten. EVT 2007.
- Machine-Assisted Election Auditing. Calandrino, Halderman, and Felten. EVT 2007.
- Analysis of an Electronic Voting System. Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin, and Wallach. IEEE Security and Privacy 2004.
- Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting. Ben Adida. USENIX Security 2008.
Advanced Topics II
Tuesday, April 9 — Private and Anonymous Communications
- Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router. Dingledine, Mattewson, and Syverson. Usenix Security, 2004.
- Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not to Use PGP. Borisov, Goldberg, and Brewer. WPES 2004.
- Keyboards and Covert Channels. Shah, Molina, and Blaze. USENIX Security 2006.
- Spot me if you can: Uncovering spoken phrases in encrypted VoIP conversations. Wright, Ballard, Coull, Monrose, and Masson. Oakland 2008.
- Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network. McCoy, Bauer, Grunwald, Kohno, and Sicker. Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium, 2008.
- Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data. Geambasu, Kohno, Levy, and Levy. Usenix Security 2009.
- Defeating Vanish with Low-Cost Sybil Attacks Against Large DHTs. Wolchok, Hofmann, Heninger, Felten, Halderman, Rossbach, Waters, and Witchel. NDSS 2010.
Thursday, April 11 — Censorship Resistance
- Chipping Away at Censorship with User-Generated Content. Burnett, Feamster, and Vempala. Usenix Security 2010.
- Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure. Wustrow, Wolchok, Goldberg, and Halderman. USENIX Security 2011.
- ConceptDoppler: A Weather Tracker for Internet Censorship. Crandall, Zinn, Byrd, Barr, and East. CCS 2007.
- Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System. Wolchok, Yao, and Halderman. Tech Report, 2009.
- Internet Censorship in China: Where Does the Filtering Occur? Xu, Mao, and Halderman.
Project Presentations
There is no assigned reading for Tuesday, April 16 or Thursday, April 18.
Physical Security
Tuesday, April 23 No written response required for today.
- Cryptology and Physical Security: Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks. Blaze. IEEE Security and Privacy, March/April 2003.
- Keep it Secret, Stupid! Blaze. 2003.
- Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding. Laxton, Wang, and Savage. CCS 2008.
- Notes on Picking Pin Tumbler Locks. Blaze. 2003.
- Safecracking for the Computer Scientist. Blaze. 2004.