Computer Science 524 Homepage

Table of contents:

Syllabus
Annoucements
Class notes
Pop quizes
Assignments
References

Announcements

MIDTERM SURVEY
midterm survey results
FINAL SURVEY
The final grade is included in your grade according to a point sharing scheme: The number of respondents is the grade for each respondent.
final survey results

Syllabus

Textbook: Computer Networks and Internets, Fifth Edition by Douglas E Comer (textbook web site)
- 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act information:
- Amazon sells it for $114.47. There is no tax and can ship free.
- Or you can rent it (see the amazon page) for $48.25 the semester.
- The Kindle edition went up from $61.47, to over $100. What's that about? Doesn't seem worth it.
- At the moment, Amazon will exchange the book for a $65 gift card. If true, your price is only about $55 dollars — but in that case renting seems surer.
Course structure:
- The course is project based. There will be pop quizes, several projects.
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/csc524. Please follow it — I use it as my private reverse-911 line for the course.
- Blog: Please refer to http://blog.cs.miami.edu/burt/category/csc524/ for class reading.
- Grader/TA: Basar Koc b_dot_koc_at_umiami_dot_edu.
- Grading: 30% quizzes, 70% projects. There is a midterm and final survey that is required. But as it is anonymous it is hard to make it required really.
- Projects are graded on a 5 points scale. There is 3 day's grace for lateness. A project due on the first has until midnight of the 4-th. Afterwards 1 point is subtracted per week (each 7 days) from that instant for a maximum of 3 points of lateness.
Projects:
- Projects are programming projects, done in C on Unix.
- You will share and submit your projects using the departmental subversion site, svn.cs.miami.edu.
- You will use Makefiles so that the graders an assistants can build your projects from source, and are guided in your test suites.
- You will make test suites for your code. I want to know what you mean when you say your project works — what things does it do or not do, according to your test suites.
- You will gain experience working with a co-located machine (Amazon AWS) thanks to a grant from Amazon.
- You will also install Virtual Box (or similar) as an alternative platform for your programming.
- The gold standard will be to compile and run on Ubuntu, Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS) - although AWS has their own which I think we be consistent with as well.
- You can also have a lab account if you wish. All these will be synced by subversion and Makefiles will rebuild on each platform.
- Mac, Windows, Unix: since we are on virtual and cloud machines, these platform considerations are sidestepped. Except you might want to work local.
- For Mac, download XCode and you should be mostly fine ... it might get messy with SSL as they have their own framework.
- For Windows local developement, I recommend installing cygwin. Visual Studio is powerful, but I think it is Microsoft centric (? anyone know otherwise ?) and outside of that Microsoft didn't really develop command line development tools (as in ... no grep?). But I've had great results with Cygwin.
- For a cloud machine, on Mac Textwrangler makes editing a file by sftp as easy as a localfile.
Writing credit: optionally the student may elect for wiring credit.
- The requirement for W is three essays each of at least 1500 words
- Topics related to computer communications, or cyberspace, at least one non-fiction.
- First paper must be submitted by mid-term
- Submit papers in a standard format by subervsion. Place them in a subdirectory writing-credit.
Thanks to Amazon for a grant under their AWS for Education program, to explore cloud computing, and integrate cloud computing concepts into the course.

Class notes

Introduction ↓ (more/less)
- OSI Model (from Ciscio Internetworking Handbook)
  - Use of the layered model; Internetworks, LAN, WAN
  - Peer to peer communications; up and down the stack
  - Encapsulation, demultiplexing
- Switching versus routing, LANS verus WANS, networking versus internetworking
  - Level 2 switching of e.g. an ethernet frame
  - Level 3 routing of e.g. a IP packet
  - Level 4 is either a UDP packet or a TPC segment
  - Protocols for the entire OSI networking stack
- Discussion of addresses, MAC, IP and DNS (a bit of a lie).
- TFTP packet dissection
- Sockets (unix access to networking, at the Level4/5 interface)
  - Beej's Guide to Network Programming (PDF)
The IP protocol, Part I ↓ (more/less)
- RFC 791 - INTERNET PROTOCOL
- Wikipedia article on IPv4 and IPv6
- Addresses, networks, and subnets: Classful and CIDR
- Private/Local addresses, Zeroconf addresses.
- NAT, PAT, port forwarding and fixups.
- IPv6 and renumbering
Datagram service, UDP ↓ (more/less)
- UDP: User Datagram Protocol, packet communications. (RFC 768)
- Port numbers
  - Well Known Ports (a.k.a. Reserved),
  - Registered ports
  - Ephemeral ports (a.k.a. dynamic)
- Examples of UDP
  - DNS RFC 1034 RFC 1035 RFC 2181 RFC 2308
  - DHCP/BOOTP RFC 2131
  - TFTP, see also RFC 1350.
The IP Protocol, Part II ↓ (more/less)
- Local delivery: RFC 826 - ARP
- RFC 2453: RIP2
  - Distance Vector
  - Counting to infinity
  - Split horizon, poison reverse, triggered updates
  - Default routers, subnets, authentication, and RIP2
  - routing notes
  - RIP protocol
- OSPF: Link state protocols
- Autonomous systems and BGP
- IP fragmentation
- ICMP, ping, traceroute, and host routing tables.
Connection service, TCP protocol ↓ (more/less)
- TCP: Transmission Control Protocol. (RFC 793)
- Class notes
  - Segment management and acknowledgements (example)
  - Connection establishment
  - Resend timers, Karn's algorithm
  - Congestion control: Slow start and Multiplicative decrease. (Also, Fast retransmit, and other just-so stories) See RFC 2001
  - Silly window syndrome, Nagel's algorithm
  - Network and port address translation
- Example session:
  - email: SMTP, 822 headers, and MIME ; POP and IMAP
  - HTTP, HTML, CSS, CGI, SHTML, DHTML, and so on.
  - CGI test
    - A POST form.
    - A GET form.
    - A CGI reference.
    - A PUT protocol trace
  - Web technologies
  - FTP, passive, interaction of protocols
Network security, protocols, and cryptography ↓ (more/less)
- crypto talk
- Cryptography: Godzilla crypto tutorial by Peter Gutmann.
- SSL and the PKI
  - SSL notes
  - Secure Socket Layer
  - PKI and certificates
  - SPKI
- Authentication
- Attacks and countermeasures:
  - Morris worm (1988)
  - Melissa macro (1999)
  - the code for Melissa
  - Samy is my hero: cross-site javascript injection (2005)
  - stack smashing (1996)
  - DNS cache poisioning (2008)
  - Firewalls, NAT, Proxies and Packet Filters: Firewall based security architecture
- Email issues (mostly Spam, but also Phishing)
  - Email authentication, Trust in Email begins with Authentication, Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, March 2008.
  - SPF: Sender Policy Framework
  - DKIM
  - Sender Base and Sender Score (reputation systems)
  - Blacklists, Whitelists, Greylists
  - Feedback systems, and engagement systems. See article.
Link level communications ↓ (more/less)
- Crash course in communication theory.
  - The Shannon-Hartley Theorem (see Wiki)
    - RC circuits
    - Shannon Source Coding Theorem
    - Shannon Noisy Channel Coding Theorem
    - References:
      
      R. V. L. Hartley Transmission of information (PDF), Bell System Technical Journal, July 1928.
      C. E. Shannon A mathematical theory of communication (PDF), The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol 27, pp 379-423, 623-656 July, October 1948.
      C. E. Shannon Communication in the presence of noise (PDF) Proc. Institute of Radio Engineers vol. 37 (1): 10-21. January 1949. http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf
  - Modulation and line codes:
    - RS-232: Baseband NRZ codes (NRZ and NRZI slides courtesy RPI)
    - 10Base-T, Manchester Encoding
    - 100Base-TX, MLT-3 and 4B5B line encoding.
    - AM, FM, PSK (slide courtesy RPI)
    - Spread spectrum
  - Error: repetition codes, Hamming codes (PDF)
- Ethernet
  - Overview
  - Cisco Documentation
  - 802.3
  - Layer 2 1/2: DIX, 802.3, 802.2 SNAP
  - CRC-32 error checking for all 802.3
  - Ethernet addressology
  - CSMA-CD, jamming, network size, exponential backoff
  - Full duplex (no collisions)
  - 100Base-TX special stuff: SSD, ESD and idle group
  - Gig-E: 4 pairs used, PAM-5 encoded, Trellis code, carrier extension and bursting
- Wi-Fi
  - Class blog about WiFi.
  - Technical Tutorial by Pablo Brenner from Breezecom.
  - Javvin documentation
  - Cisco documentation
- Bridges, Switches, Hubs and Repeaters
  - Transparent bridges.
  - Spanning Tree Protocol
  - VLAN's

Quizes

Quiz 1 posted. Copy [repo]/class/quiz/quiz1.txt to [repo]/my-dir/quiz/quiz1.txt and edit with your answers.
Due before class on Wed, Jan 30.
Quiz 2 posted. Copy [repo]/class/quiz/quiz2.txt to [repo]/my-dir/quiz/quiz2.txt and edit with your answers.
Due before class on Wed, Feb 6.
Quiz 3 posted.
Due before class on Wed, Feb 13.
Quiz 4 posted.
Due before class on Wed, Feb 20.
Quiz 5 posted (actually it is a survey
Special due date: Monday, March 11.
Quiz 6 posted.
Due before class on Wed, March 20.
Quiz 7 posted.
Due before class on Wed, April 3.
Quiz 8 posted.
Due before class on Wed, April 24.
Quiz 9 (the final) posted (actually it is a survey
Special due date: Monday, May 6.

Reading

Chapters 1 and 2 in Comer.
Chapter 3 in Comer, assigned Jan 24.
Beej's Guide to Network Programming (PDF)
Chapters 13 and 20 through 23 in Comer.
Chapters 24 through 27 in Comer.

Assignments

Project 1: Ping Familiarization Project
Due: ~~Monday, 28~~ Wednesday, 30 January.
Project 2: Netcat Project.
Due: Monday, 11 February.
- See the completed Netbounce Project for sample code.
- Test with an AWS server (ports 3333 through 3339 are open) and your virtual machine.
- Your your Makefile should run a test suite. I will most likely test that small and large text (ASCII) files will transfer, and small and large binary files will transfer. Check that the transfered file is the same as the sent file.
- Submit by subversion with log message "submitting for grading".
Project 3: Pass-it-on Project.
The signature code can be found in [repo]/class/proj3/signature.c.
The peer registry of running passiton servers is found at the bottom of the project page.
To run your program while you are logged out of AWS, use "nohup ./pass-it-on &". To get rid of all pass-it-on instances launched nohup, use "killall pass-it-on".
Change notice: For your password, don't use your real password, use your username concatenated with itself. So that "burt" is "burtburt". This simplifies things and sufficiently demonstrates the principles. The T mode is then deprecated.
Due: Monday, 25 February.
Project 4: The TFTP Project
Due: Monday, March 25.
- Read the RFC 1350 on TFTP.
- Here is a packet trace and dissection for the first packet, for your reference.
- You can collect these things using sudo tcpdump -i lo -X -nn, where milage may vary on the interface name "lo", do ifconfig -a to see the names of your interfaces.
- To avoid firewall issues, it is ok to test this on localhost.
- A test suite will be provided in the [repo]/class/proj4/test directory.
Project 5: Webserver Project
Due: Monday, April 15
- Information on the HTTP Protocol.
- Implement GET and POST.
- For GET queries you will need to understand percent encoding.
- First implement a server of fixed pages, then launch processes to handle the request, if it is a POST or a GET with a query appended.
- To serve a fixed page, the URL will give the name of a file (if it is a pathname, send back a not found error), and send that back to the client, with the appropriate headers added: Content-Type and Content-Length are really necessary.
- If the URL is a query or a POST, start the program named in the URL, send the query to the program through stdin and stream to the requester what the program writes to stdout.
- To direct your browser to test your server, you can use the syntax ec2-50-19-171-60.compute-1.amazonaws.com:3337 for port 3337.
- See information on piping stdin and stdout for more help with this.
Project 6: Webservices Project
Due: Wednesday, May 1
- Building off of project 5, we will write a toy webservices application that does a simple four function calculator.
- Write a CGI program launched by your webserver that takes three CGI encoded arguments, op, a and b, and returns the result of the calculation a op b; op can be "ADD", "SUB", "MUL" or "DIV", and a and b are floating point values. It would look like this:
```
        POST /calc HTTP/1.1
        Host: myhost.dummy.to
        Content-Length: 18
        Content-Type: Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
        
        op=ADD&a=1.0&b=2.0  
```
- You should return a complete web page, that nicely displays, in this case, that 1.0 + 2.0 = 3.0, or similar.

References

Additional textbooks:
- Radia Perlman, Interconnects: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols.
- Douglas Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol I: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture.
- William R. Cheswick and Steven M. Bellovin, Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker.
General Networking
- Network Programming course at RPI by Dave Hollinger.
- Cisco: Internetworking Technology Handbook
Software engineering for security
- Demystifing Suid, Wagner et. al, Usenix.
WEP
- My RC4 example.
- CRC-32 failure of WEP.
- SecurityFocus review
- Attacks on RC4 and WEP, Fluhrer, Mantin, Shamir, Cryptobytes Vol 5., No. 2, 2002, pp 26-34.
- KoreK attacks in chopper.
  Korek explains some of them.
- Weakness in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4 Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin, Adi Shamir.
- Using the Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir Attack to Break WEP Adam Stubblefield, John Ioannidis, Aviel Rubin.
- AirSnort source code.
SSL
- HP Tutorial
- Secure Socket Layer
- My short tutorial
- IBM developer works, Open SSL Part 1
- IBM developer works, Open SSL Part 2
- IBM developer works, Open SSL Part 3
- OpenSSL Command Line Reference
Exploits
- New LAND attack
- Teardrop
- Speed Pass broken, Rubin et. al.
- Word/Excel Reuse RC4 stream.
- SANS Tutorial: Why your switched network isn't secure.
- TCP/IP Weakness, Robert Morris
- Bellovin, TCP/IP Security Issues
Virus
- Virus creation
- Melissa
- Virus catelog
- CIAC Melissa bulletin.
- MySpace worm
Open Source Security Response Philosophy
- Full disclosure prinicpals for mozilla.
- Mozilla security response document.
- Full dislosure document.
Secure Operating Systems
- grsecurity, a secure linux extension.
- Secure Linux from the NSA.
- PaX, page-executable kernel modifications.
RFC's
- RFC 768: User Datagram Protocol
- RFC 791: INTERNET PROTOCOL
- RFC 793: TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL
- RFC 821: SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL
- RFC 822: STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES
- RFC 826: ARP
- RFC 1034: DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES
- RFC 1035: DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION
- RFC 1058: Routing Information Protocol
- RFC 1350: THE TFTP PROTOCOL (REVISION 2) (obsoletes RFC 783)
- RFC 1939: Post Office Protocol - Version 3
- RFC 2001: TCP congestion
- RFC 2045: MIME
- RFC 2046: MIME
- RFC 2131: DHCP/BOOTP
- RFC 2181: DNS clarifications
- RFC 2222: Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL)
- RFC 2308: DNS negative caching
- RFC 2453: RIP2
- RFC 2692: SPKI Requirements
- RFC 2693: SPKI Certificate Theory
- RFC 2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. (obsoletes RFC 821)
- RFC 2822: Internet Message Format. (obsoletes RFC 822)
- RFC 2829: Authentication Methods for LDAP
- RFC 3207: STARTTLS extension for SMTP
- RFC 3501: Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1.
- RFC 3700: Internet Official Protocol Standards
- RFC 4398: Storing certificates in DNS
- RFC 4871: DKIM
- RFC 4987: TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common Mitigations
IPv6
Port Knocking
Cookies
- Wikipedia article
- Cookiecentral
- See also relevant RFC's.
Topics for next term
- Keychains, methods of key diversity
- Spam and Phishing counter-measures
- Amir Herzberg course.
- Kaminski at HAR2009 (1 of 7)