This is a series of lectures on a few broad topics in computer systems security. This series is based upon a similar course that I teach here at IISc. It is not supposed to be a comprehensive overview of computer systems security (far from it!), but covers a few popular topics. The course does not require any prerequisites except for a basic undergraduate-level exposure to standard computer science topics, such as operating systems, systems programming, computer architecture, and a few others. You should be able to pick up this background (should you lack it) from standard textbooks, or various sources on the Internet.

  • Topic
  •  
  • References
  •  
  • Lecture
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

I have made these lectures available to the general public in case they are of use to anyone seeking to learn the basics of computer systems security. I will unfortunately not have the time to answer questions regarding this course from anyone outside the IISc community. The lecture videos posted here are from the Autumn 2020 offering of E0-256 at IISc. Some lectures may reference homeworks and projects. Those are references to material distributed to the students when I teach the course at IISc. I apologize that I will not be able to make that material freely available to the general public.

The course is best learned if you have a virtual machine on hand, and are able to try some of the material that is taught in the course hands-on. Many of the code examples referenced in the lectures are pre-loaded onto this virtual machine (download and tar -xzvf class_vm.tar.gz). You can get the virtual machine running using Oracle VM VirtualBox (version 6.1.16), and try out the code examples and the demos shown in the video lectures. The password of the root user on this virtual machine is the same as the login name.

The course draws upon various sources as reference material, and does not follow any prescribed textbook. However, if you prefer a texbook to learn some basic material, the book on Security Engineering by Ross Anderson is a decent reference. Older editions of the book are available for free download from the author's webpage.