Instructors

Yan Chen, Associate Professor, ychen@northwestern.edu

Hao Chen, Associate Professor, chen@ucdavis.edu

Location and Time

Lectures: Mon 8:00am-11:25am, Caoguangbiao High-Tech Building West, Room 503

Mon 7:30pm-9:10pm for second week

Course Description

This course will focus on information system penetration (hacking). The class will introduce basic theory for many different types of attacks; then we will actually carry them out in ’real-world’ settings. During the course, we will read and discuss papers written by professors as well as hackers. We will learn about different types of hacks and preform them. After learning how to execute such exploits and penetrate a network, we will discuss ways to protect a network from others exploiting the same vulnerabilities.

Course Prerequisites

  • Recommended: introductory courses on Operating Systems, Computer Networking, OR Principles of Programming Languages.

Teaching Materials

Grading Policy

No exams for this class.

  • Class participation 10%
  • Paper reading summary 10%
  • In class paper presentation and debate 25%
  • Project (including proposal, presentation and report) 55%

Projects

  • Projects (done in groups of size 2+) are a critical component of this course. Your goal is to design, build and evaluate interesting systems that address issues, solve problems and exploit techniques from classroom discussions and readings.
  • Projects must be written up in a term paper and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a mini-conference and write up a report. The list of potential ideas for projects are on Project Section. Feel free to use one, propose something completely different, or refine one of these into your own idea.