General Information
Instructor
Matt Bishop
Email: mabishop@ucdavis.edu
Office: 2209 Watershed Sciences
Phone: (530) 752-8060
Office Hours: W 9:00am–9:50am, Th 4:10–5:00pm, F 12:10pm–1:00pm
Teaching Assistants
Yeh-Cheng Chen, Email: ycch@ucdavis.edu
Office: 55 Kemper Hall
Office Hours: Tu 1:10pm–4:00pm
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Jonathan Vronsky, Email: jvronsky@ucdavis.edu
Office: 55 Kemper Hall
Office Hours: M 1:10pm–3:00pm, W 10:00am–10:50am
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Lectures
TuTh 19:00am–10:20am in 106 Wellman
Discussion Sections
ECS 153-A01: W 3:10pm–4:00pm in 108 Hoagland (Yeh-Cheng Chen)
ECS 153-A02: F 1:10pm–2:00pm in 1006 Giedt (Jonathan Vronsky)
ECS 153-A03: W 2:10pm–3:00pm in 166 Chemistry (Yeh-Cheng Chen)
Course Outline
Introduce principles, mechanisms, and implementations of computer security; learn how attacks work, how to defend against them, and how to design systems to withstand them
Course Goals
Some goals we hope you achieve:
- learn about security in the UNIX system and programming environments;
- learn how to attack a system, and to defend it by analyzing the system for vulnerabilities and ameliorating those problems;
- understand the strengths, and weaknesses of cryptography as a tool of security;
- learn how access to systems, resources, and data can be controlled;
- learn the basics of writing security-related programs; and
- learn about security in networks.
Prerequisite
The prerequisites for this course are ECS 150, Operating Systems, and ECS 152A, Computer Networks. Students who have not taken these courses are at a serious disadvantage in this class, and will be dropped unless the instructor approves them taking the class. To make your case, please email the instructor a letter stating which prerequisite you are missing and why it should be waived (for example, you have experience in networking but never took ECS 152A).
Text
There is no text. Chapters of a textbook being updated will be made available on SmartSite.
Computers
All registered students have been given an account on the computer science instructional machines in the basement (the Computer Science Instructional Facility, CSIF).
Class Web Site
The class web site is on SmartSite.
To access it, go to http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu and log in using your campus login and password.
Then go to ECS 153 in your schedule.
Announcements, assignments, handouts, and grades will be posted there,
and you must submit assignments there. The alternate web site,
http://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/classes/ecs153-2016-02
has everything except grades, and you cannot submit work there.
Homework
All homework is due at 11:55pm on the date stated on the homework, unless otherwise specified. The handout All About Homework discusses homework.
Extra Credit
Extra credit is tallied separately from regular scores.
It counts in your favor if you end up on a borderline between two grades at the end of the course. But, not doing extra credit will never be counted against you,
because grades are assigned on the basis of regular scores.
You should do extra credit if you find it interesting and think that it might teach you something.
Remember, though, it is not wise to skimp on the regular assignment in order to do extra credit!
Exams
Midterm: Thursday, April 28 in class
Final: Wednesday, June 8 at 10:30am–12:30am
These will be open book/open notes exams (but no computers are allowed). No early or late exam will be given; if you miss an exam for medical reasons (you must document this; no other excuses are acceptable), you may be allowed or required to take a make-up exam, or the other parts of the course will be counted proportionally more (the choice is the instructor’s). In particular, forgetting the time or place of an exam is not an excuse for missing it!
Grading
| Homework | | 50% |
| Midterm Exam | | 25% |
| Final Exam | | 25% |
Academic Integrity
The UC Davis Code of Academic Conduct, available at http://sja.ucdavis.edu/cac.html, applies to this class. In particular, for this course:
- All work submitted for credit must be your own. You may discuss your assignments with classmates, with the instructor, or with the teaching assistant in the course to get ideas or a critique of your ideas, but the ideas and words you submit must be your own. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, collaboration is considered cheating and will be dealt with accordingly.
- For written homework, you must write up your own solutions and may neither read nor copy another student’s solutions.
- For programs, you must create and type in your own code and document it yourself. Note that you are free to seek help while debugging a program once it is written.
A good analogy between appropriate discussion and inappropriate collaboration is the following: you and a fellow student work for competing software companies developing different products to meet a given specification. You and your competitor might choose to discuss product specifications and general techniques employed in your products, but you certainly would not discuss or exchange proprietary information revealing details of your products. Ask the instructor for clarification beforehand if the above rules are not clear.
