SAMS 2013 -- Cyber Security Class

Cyber Security: Do you take the red pill or the blue pill?

In this project oriented class we take a hands-on approach to learning how hackers "hack" into systems, and then how to defend against attacks. Topics covered include password cracking, infecting machines with viruses, eavesdropping on network communication, and hiding data. Of course we also go through how to defend passwords by salting them, how to detect viruses with signatures, how to secure communications over a network, and how to detect hidden data.

Syllabus

This is a living document and not finalized (it may even change during the course). Every lecture is designed for a 2 hour timeslot, I generally split them into 45 minutes - 1 hour 15 minutes of lecturing and the rest is hands-on lab work. Here is a list of tools used during class.

1	Overview and Tools of the Trade
2	Passwords, Hashing, Rainbow Tables, and Cracking
3	Hands-On Cracking and Hashing
4	Viruses, Backdoors, and Stealing What's not Yours
5	Just a Bunch of Tubes: Networking Attacks
6	Defense Against the Dark Arts: Tools
7	ML1: Probability Review, Machine Learning (Weak AI), Tokenization
8	ML2: Naive Bayes Parameter Estimation
9	ML3: Naive Bayes Decisions
10	Calculating Accuracy, and Analyzing Black Boxes
11	Introduction to Cryptography: Perfect Cryptography
12	Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
13	Applied Public-Key Cryptography
14	The Last Lecture
15	Buffer Day (July 4 or final day off)

License

All course materials and code are released under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for more details.