CS 553X - Software Security

Credits: 3

This hands-on course covers offensive and defensive technologies in the area of software security. Particularly, students will learn about various vulnerabilities that lead to software compromise, attacks that exploit such vulnerabilities, and defenses that defend against such attacks. Topics covered include simple control-flow corruption attacks, slightly harder buffer overflow and return-to-libc attacks, advanced ROP attacks, Meltdown and Spectre attacks on the hardware. Students are expected to not only learn the concepts behind each attack, but also execute them in a controlled environment. Prerequisite: Undergraduate Operating Systems. Term offered varies.