CS530L

Until recent years, information systems security was the limited focus of the military and the financial communities. With the recent explosive growth and merging of telecommunications and computing, security has become an integral element of any reliable and robust information systems environment. This class will cover information systems security at the graduate level. Students should have a basic understanding of networking and operating systems prior to attending the class.

DETER accounts - change of plans We will supply your DETER accounts a little differently than described Friday. Please do not make the account requests as asked for that day (with apology for the change). Instead, I expect the accounts to be created by the DETER admin folks, and then we'll advise you how to access them. Thank you for your patience and please stand by. (2/7)

DETER network testbed - we will soon use it. You will need an account. Please apply for your DETER account now. The procedure is explained at the link entitled "get/use an account" at left. Read it, and create/test/destroy the test network as it instructs. Also examine the other links at left under the heading "DETER net testbed." Note that when you apply for your account it won't become immediately available, until I complete an approval/activation step. (2/5)

Superfluous slides - there are a number of slides in the posted presentation about cryptography that cover JN-25 and DES. I did not discuss them in lecture yesterday, you don't deal with them in the lab, and you needn't concern yourselves with them.
JN-25 is one of the codes (they were routinely changed) used in World War II by the Japanese navy, whose cracking by US cryptanalysts played a major role in the Pacific war. DES is the substitution cipher that was approved by the government in the 1980s and widely used as a standard throughout government and industry in the 1990s until its strength was exceeded by advances in computer processing power. It was replaced by AES (Rijndael) as a government standard in 2002. (1/30)

Weekly lab meeting time: Fridays @ 14:30 - please attend for the Wireshark lab this Friday 1/27. After lab, if you wish to attend in person, go to lecture which follows at 16:00 on the subject of cryptography. (1/27)

Determination (almost) of lab meeting time - finally with your help we've identified two possible meeting times. I'd like you to choose between them by voting for one or the other. They turn out to be on Friday either shortly before or shortly after my weekly 16:00-16:50h lecture:

Friday 14:30-15:50 (10 minutes between lab and lecture)
or
Friday 17:30-18:50 (40 minutes between lecture and lab)

(If you choose the latter I'm almost sure we could slide the meeting time earlier to reduce the 40 minute gap, to 17:00 or 17:15.) Necessary evils:

14:30 - full week after corresponding lecture. Too long! Topic goes stale, differs from same day's lecture's.
17:30 - merely minutes after corresponding lecture. Too short! Not enough time to preview instructions.

But these evils are, unfortunately, indeed necessary. I point them out for your consideration. Now, which one do you want? Another web form awaits. Please express your preference by end-of-Tuesday and I will publish the results here on Wednesday.

Please vote. Here is the online "ballot":

Please mark

x - for the one timeslot when you want us to meet
nothing - for the other one

Please check here again Wednesday or after to find out which one the class chose. Thank you. (11/24)

If you're interested in learning more about linux at an extracurricular event, SCaLE 8x conference is coming up. (The conference has been excellent in recent years.)

SCALE organizers sent me a message:
"Dear Professor...We would appreciate you mentioning our event to your students.... We are including a promotional code (EDU10), which will provide your students with 50% off our conference registration.... Students may register online at the following link: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/reg7/ ..." (1/24)

Saturday midnight - requested deadline for you to feed me your information on the webform below. I will determine a lab meeting day and time on Sunday and post here. (1/22)

NEW TIMESLOTS - ROUND 2 - Selecting a compatible time for weekly lab meetings -
PLEASE EXPRESS PREFERENCES FOR NEW TIMESLOTS, ON NEW WEBFORM:

No universally compatible timeslot exists among the 10 offered on last week's webform. The form has been re-loaded with a new set of of 16 different timeslots, as above. Each would have 1 hour and 20 minutes' duration from the starting time shown. Please re-visit the form and express your availability in just the same way you already did for the earlier timeslot offerings. On the form (which does not validate entries) please make entries for the timeslots as follows:

x - for any timeslot that you can't attend because your personal schedule directly conflicts with it
1 - for whichever other timeslot is your first preference
2 - for whichever one is your second preference

Please leave the others blank. Thank you. (1/20)

Initial lab topic - packet sniffing with Wireshark and tcpdump. See the link at left entitled "Packet sniffing." (1/15)

DETER network testbed - please familiarize yourself with DETER by briefly exploring the links under "DETER net testbed" at left. Later in the semester we will do exercises using DETER's remote hardware, instead of our lab's hardware. Don't apply for an account yet, just take an exploratory look around. (1/15)

Selecting a compatible time for weekly lab meetings

Based on lab grader and room-availability schedules, we can choose among several possible meeting times, reflected on this web form:

On the form (which does not validate entries) please make entries for the timeslots as follows:

Please leave the others blank. (1/15)

The web form is here. To use it, you need to supply an ID. I pre-loaded the form with your IDs, for which I used your email address prefixes (i.e, the part of your email address, as supplied by Prof. Cheng, that precedes the "@") (1/15)

Slides from today's lecture (1/15)

Lab location - room OHE406. The hardware-identical computers in this room have removable hard drives. You will be assigned a drive. You will insert it in one of the computers when you arrive at the lab each week. You will put it in a locker afterward, where it will be stored for you until the following week's session. (1/15)

DEN students - most of the lab exercises are performed on either Windows or in a VMware virtual machine. Taking the liberty of assuming you have access to a Windows machine, please use that for the Windows-based exercises. For the vm-based exercises, we will make available images of the same vm's that are installed in the lab, for you to install on your machine. You will then be able to run that vm using VMware server, which is distributed free from www.vmware.com. The lab handouts (instructions) will be posted online, on this website, weekly. I intend to distribute the vm images available to you on a DVD that either you will download and burn or receive by mail. If you are a DEN student kindly send me an email saying so, in order that I know to whom to supply this material. (1/15)