Midterm Study Guide

This is simply a guide of topics that I consider important for the midterm. I don’t promise to ask you about them all, or about any of these in particular; but I may very well ask you about any of these, as well as anything we discussed in class, in the discussion section, or that is in the readings (including the papers).
  1. Fundamentals
    1. What is security?
    2. Basics of risk analysis
    3. Relationship of security policy to security
    4. Policy vs. mechanism
    5. Assurance and security
  2. Saltzer’s and Schroeder’s principles of secure design
  3. Robust programming
  4. Common vulnerabilities
    1. Buffer overflows
    2. Injections (SQL, command)
    3. Failure to check inputs
    4. Execution with unnecessary privileges
  5. Penetration studies
    1. Flaw hypothesis methodology
  6. Vulnerability models
    1. RISOS
    2. Program Analysis
    3. NRL
    4. Aslam
  7. Attack models
    1. Attack trees
    2. Requires/provides model
  8. Access control matrix
    1. Matrix
    2. Primitive operations
    3. Commands
    4. Harrison-Ruzzo-Ullman result (undecidability of safety)
  9. Policies
    1. Mandatory access control (MAC)
    2. Discretionary access control (DAC)
    3. Originator-controlled access control (ORCON)
    4. Role-based access control (RBAC)
  10. Confidentiality Models
    1. Bell-LaPadula Model
    2. Lattices and the BLP Model
    3. Tranquility
  11. Integrity Models
    1. Biba Model
You can also obtain a PDF version of this. Version of April 23, 2013 at 9:05PM