Materials

The slides (pdf) from lecture have annotations.

• Intro to course staff
• Cybersecurity involves the study of four categories of failures and how to avoid them
  • Failure of operation (mostly human error in usage)
  • Failure of implementation (programming errors like buffer overflows)
  • Failure of design (a more fundamental error during the design process)
  • Failure of abstraction (incorrect modelling of the adversary)
• Examples of recent failures from each category
• Discussion of course structure and policies

Setting up your environment

You should perform all of your coursework for this class inside a “virtual machine” or VM. As we mentioned, a VM is a basic way to “simulate” another operating system on your own computer. We do this to isolate the work for this class from the rest of your machine, in particular, so everyone in the class has a similar experience, and so you can feel more relaxed about experimenting. For the purposes of this course, whatever you do in your virtual machine should be isolated from your laptop, so you won’t mess up your machine.

The following video shows you how to setup a VM using virtual box and running Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop, which is a modern, free Linux environment well-suited for this class.