Materials

The slides (pdf) from lecture.

• 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 using Google Cloud Shell, which is a simple way to access a Linux virtual machine or VM from your webbrowser. 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 main computer.

To use cloud shell, first use the secret course link to receive GCP educational credits. This allows you to pay for a compute instance that you can use during the semester. Be sure to close your session when you are done. Don’t worry, when you restart it, it will resume exactly from where you left it.