CAP6135: Malware and Software Vulnerability Analysis
(Spring 2011)

Home                      Schedule notes                        Assignment


The "written notes" are what the instructor writes on Tablet PC "Windows Journal" in each class. They can be read directly by Internet Explorer. If you use Firefox, you need to first install "unMHT" add-on to view them.

Class 1 (01/11):  Course introduction, how to give a good presentation
Class 2 (01/13):  Give good presentation (continue); software security introduction
Class 3 (01/18): 
Software security intro (continue); Basic network security introduction
Class 4 (01/20):  basic network security (continue)
                        after class reading materials: "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit", Alpha One
                                                  "
Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerability of the Decade," Crispin Cowan, et al.
Class 5 (01/25):   Term project description
Class 6 (01/27):  
Stack Overflow I: Attack Introduction
Class 7 (02/01):   Stack Overflow example using GDB, Project 1 is assigned and due Feb. 14th via Webcourse;  Stack Overflow II: Defense (written notes)
Class 8 (02/03):   Stack overflow defense (continue);
Find Software Bugs
Class 9 (02/08):  
Find Software Bugs (continue); Introduce instructor's ACSAC'07 best student award paper on fuzzing
Class 10 (02/10): ACSAC'07 paper continue; Example of term project topics;
Program Verification & Other Types of Vulnerabilities
Class 11 (02/15): Continue program verification and other vulnerabilities; Email spam
Class 12 (02/17): Email spam continue;  (
homework 1 is assigned and due Feb. 24th)
Class 13 (02/22): Virus (term project proposal is assigned and due on Mar. 02 on webcourse)
Class 14 (02/24): Worm
Class 15 (03/01):
Paper presentation and summary; Botnet
Class 16 (03/03):
Term project proposal presentation, Project 2 is assigned and due Mar. 22nd
                          All groups' term project proposal slides (download)
Class 17 (03/15): Jon Rhoades: Spamming Botnet: Signatures and Characteristics
                          Bo Sun:
Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds
Class 18 (03/17): Justin Rhodes: All Your iFRAMEs Point to Us
                          Faisal Amjad: An Analysis of Social Network-Based Sybil Defenses
                          some tips on project 2; project 2 due date is extended to Mar. 27th
Class 19 (03/22): Joseph Del Rocco: Blueprint: Robust Prevention of Cross-site Scripting Attacks for Existing Browsers
                         lecture:
Peer-to-peer botnets
Class 20 (03/24): Steven: TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphone
                          Hector: Countering Kernel Rootkits with Lightweight Hook Protection
Class 21 (03/29):
Edmund: Protecting Browsers from Extension Vulnerabilities
                          Jon Rhodes: HyperSafe: A Lightweight Approach to Provide Lifetime Hypervisor Control-Flow Integrity
Class 22 (03/31): Justin: Detecting Spammers on Social Networks
                          Bo Sun: VEX: Vetting Browser Extensions for Security Vulnerabilities
               04/05:  No class (teacher out of town)
Class 23 (04/07): Faisal: Privacy-preserving p2p data sharing with oneswarm
                          Edmund: Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing
Class 24 (04/12): Hector: TaintScope: A Checksum-Aware Directed Fuzzing Tool for Automatic Software Vulnerability Detection
                          Joseph Del Rocco: Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data
                          Second-round paper summary for online student is assigned and due by April 23rd

Class 25 (04/14): Steven: Dude, where’s that IP? Circumventing measurement-based IP geolocation
                          Lecture: "Scene Tagging: Image-Based CAPTCHA Using Image Composition and Object Relationships", AsiaCCS'10 by Peter Matthews and Cliff Zou.

Class 26 (04/19): Lecture: Honeypot, DDoS, and Rootkit
             (04/21): No lecture; please try to finish term project

             (04/28): 1pm-3:50pm: Term project presentation for face-to-face students (online students need to put speaking notes on their term project slides; all students term project are due by midnight April 27th via webcourse; you should submit both presentation slides and project report paper)




Research papers for in-class presentation:

1.  (Edmond) "Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing", P. Godefroid, M.Y. Levin, D. Molnar, Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2008.
2. (Steven) "TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphone", William Enck, Peter Gilbert, Byung-gon Chun, Landon P. Cox, Jaeyeon Jung, Patrick McDaniel, and Anmol N. Sheth, USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2010.
3. (Faisal Amjad) "An Analysis of Social Network-Based Sybil Defenses", Bimal Viswanath, Ansley Post, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, SIGCOMM 2010.
4. (Jon Rhoades) "Spamming Botnet: Signatures and Characteristics". Yinglian Xie, Fang Yu, Kannan Achan, Rina Panigrahy, Geoff Hulten, and Ivan Osipkov. SIGCOMM, 2008.
5. (Justin Rhodes) "All Your iFRAMEs Point to Us." Niels Provos and Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Fabian Monrose. 17th USENIX Security Symposium, San Jose, CA, 2008.
6. (Edmond) "Protecting Browsers from Extension Vulnerabilities", Adam Barth, Adrienne Porter Felt, Prateek Saxena, and Aaron Boodman. 17th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2010.
7. (Joseph Del Rocco) "Blueprint: Robust Prevention of Cross-site Scripting Attacks for Existing Browsers", IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'09), Oakland, CA, May 2009.
8. (Bo Sun) "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds", Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Chicago, IL, November 2009.
9.  (Hector) "Countering Kernel Rootkits with Lightweight Hook Protection," Zhi Wang, Xuxian Jiang, Weidong Cui, Peng Ning, Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2009).
10. (Jon Rhoades) "HyperSafe: A Lightweight Approach to Provide Lifetime Hypervisor Control-Flow Integrity," Zhi Wang, Xuxian Jiang, Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2010), Oakland, CA, May 2010.
11. "Countering Kernel Rootkits with Lightweight Hook Protection," Zhi Wang, Xuxian Jiang, Weidong Cui, Peng Ning, Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2009), Chicago, IL, November 2009.
12. (Bo Sun) "VEX: Vetting Browser Extensions for Security Vulnerabilities", Sruthi Bandhakavi, Samuel T. King, P. Madhusudan, and Marianne Winslett, USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix), 2010 (best paper award).
13. (Joseph Del Rocco) "Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data", Roxana Geambasu, Tadayoshi Kohno, Amit A. Levy, and Henry M. Levy, USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix), 2009 (best student paper award).
14. (Hector) "TaintScope: A Checksum-Aware Directed Fuzzing Tool for Automatic Software Vulnerability Detection", Tielei Wang, Tao Wei, Guofei Gu, Wei Zou, 31st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), Oakland, CA, May 2010. (Best Student Paper Award).
15. (Justin Rhodes) "Detecting Spammers on Social Networks", Gianluca Stringhini, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2010. (Best student paper award).
16. (Faisal Amjad) "Privacy-preserving p2p data sharing with oneswarm", Tomas Isdal ,  Michael Piatek ,  Arvind Krishnamurthy ,  Thomas Anderson, ACM Sigcomm, 2010.
17. (Steven) "Dude, where’s that IP? Circumventing measurement-based IP geolocation", Phillipa Gill, Yashar Ganjali, David Lie, Bernard Wong. Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Security, 2010.