About the Course
E0-256 seeks to equip students with the fundamental principles and practice of computer systems security. The course will cover the major techniques of offense and defense, thereby educating students to think both as attackers and defenders. By the end of the course, students will have been exposed to the state of the art, and will be equipped with the background to start conducting original research in computer systems security.
Must I take this course?
The course will require a commitment (aside from the lectures) of about 8-10 hours per week from your side, perhaps more. This includes reading papers and working on the semester-long course project. This is a systems course in a computer science department. So yes, there will be programming. Lots of it. Please decide your course plan based upon this expectation and the workload you have in other courses for which you have registered. But I guarantee that if you take this course, you will learn a ton stuff in security and privacy---it will be hard work, but it will also be fun.
Administrative Details
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Instructor:
Vinod Ganapathy.
- Class hours:
Monday and Wedsday, 10:00am-11:30am, in CSA-112.
- MS Teams:
Link to the class group on MS Teams for is here:
2023 Teams Link.
This will be our forum for all online discussion related to the class,
our portal to make announcements related to the class, and manage grading
and so forth. Join this MS Teams group without fail. A request will be
automatically sent to me the first time you request to join the group.
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TAs: Hrushikesh Salunke hrushikeshs@iisc.ac.in
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Required textbook: Our reader is a set of
research papers, as posted on the
class schedule.
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Additional references: You may find these books to be useful
references for various topics that we cover in class.
- Security Engineering, 2nd edition (free online copy), by Ross Anderson.
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (free online copy), by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau. During the course, we will refer to many operating systems concepts. You can use this book to acquire or brush up on the necessary OS background.
- Prerequisites: No formal pre-requisites except undergraduate-level exposure to computer science. In particular, no prior exposure to computer security is expected. However, computer systems security is a topic that spans a number of areas. We therefore expect undergraduate-level exposure to standard computer science courses such as discrete mathematics, algorithms, operating systems, computer architecture, programming languages, compilers, and networks. If you lack the background in any of these topics, there are online courses available these days that let you fill in your missing background. You can use the following self-assessment test to check your background knowledge in related areas.