General Information

Course description

Advanced techniques for writing exploits and patching vulnerabilities will be taught through intense, hands-on security laboratory. A significant part of the course is to solve Capture-The-Flag (CTF) problems and discuss about strategies to solve them. This course covers a variety of topics that include reverse engineering, exploitation, binary analysis, cryptography, web and forensic.

Prerequisite

Operating system or equivalent (e.g., CS 3210 at GT).

Class meetings

  • When: F 2:05pm-4:55pm
  • Where: Klaus 2443

Office hours and recitation

We have an optional recitation (and office hours) from 5-6pm in Klaus 1447 on Wed every week.

Who should take CS 6265-seclab?

CS-6265 is primarily intended for motivated seniors and graduate students who are interested in learning skill sets to participate CTF competitions (e.g., DEFCON CTF).

Grading policy

  • 100% Lab.
  • If you didn’t turn in a single (full) lab, you will get F.
  • No midterm and final exams.
  • 40%: A, 30-40%: B, 30-20%: C and below (in each group).
  • Three groups: undergraduate, masters and graduate students
  • See Game Rules.

Online Discussion

Online discussion is strongly encouraged and it will help you a lot in solving lab problems. Please join Piazza and post your questions, ideas and thoughts.

Misconduct Policy

Similar to UW’s CSE 451 and MIT’s 6.828, CS3210 provides a week days of a grace period (50% points) and we strictly follow the cheating policy (read GT’s Academic Misconduct Policy).

Important

Cheating vs. collaboration

Collaboration is a very good thing. On the other hand, cheating is considered a very serious offense and is vigorously prosecuted. Vigorous prosecution requires that you be advised of the cheating policy of the course before the offending act.

For this semester, the policy is simple: don’t cheat:
  • Never share code or text on the project.
  • Never use someone else’s code or text in your solutions.
  • Never consult project code or text that might be on the Internet.
On the other hand, for this class, you are strongly encouraged to:
  • Share ideas.
  • Explain your code to someone to see if they know why it doesn’t work.
  • Help someone else debug if they’ve run into a wall.

If you obtain help of any kind, always write the name(s) of your sources.

Staff/TA

  • TA: Insu Yun, Wen Xu, Ren Ding, Yeongjin Jang
  • Feel free to send us an email to make an appointment (mailto:staff)