Resources

Ed. The best way to ask a short question about the course materials is via Ed, an online forum in which students ask (and answer) questions. Please do not email such questions to individual staff members; use Ed. The course staff monitors this forum regularly.

Lecture slides will be made available after lecture on Canvas.

Office hours. For more substantial questions about the course materials and assignments, you should attend office hours.

Books. Here are some good books about security, in case you are interested.

• Ross J. Anderson, Security Engineering. 3rd Edition. 2021. [Covers security in general, with many non-computing examples.]
• Dieter Gollmann, Computer Security. 3rd Edition. 2011. [General security textbook. Good for what it covers, but doesn't cover everything.]
• David Kahn, The Codebreakers. 1996. [History of cryptography. Not very technical.]
• Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, Practical Cryptography. 2003. [Focused coverage of applied cryptography, not the most rigorous.]
• John Viega and Gary McGraw, Building Secure Software. 2011. [How to write software that will have fewer security bugs.]
• Michal Zalewski, The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications. 2011. [Web security. Strikes a good balance between conceptual exposition and messy detail.]

Java. Assignments that use Java were designed in Java SE Development Kit 11 - also known as JDK 11. Students who have completed COS126/226 will have JDK 11. We do not anticipate any compatibility issues if you have other versions of Java like JDK 8. If you run into issues with the autograders or Java versions, please contact course staff. To determine which version of Java is installed on your platform:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Execute the command: java -version
3. If you have JDK 11 installed, you will see output that contains messages with the string "version 11.0.11" (or similar).

See the Oracle website for download/installation instructions for your platform

If you need assistance installing JDK 11, see the undergraduate lab TAs in Lewis 121.

Wireshark. Wireshark is a network packet analysis tool and is available at https://www.wireshark.org.

VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a hosted hypervisor for running operating systems (VMs) and is available at https://www.virtualbox.org

Kali Linux VM. Linux distribution used for penetration testing, ethical hacking, and network security assessments and is available at https://www.kali.org