General Information

Course Description

This course covers advanced techniques for writing exploits and patching vulnerabilities, taught through an intense, hands-on security laboratory. A significant part of this course involves solving Capture-The-Flag (CTF) and discussing strategies for solving such problems. This course covers a variety of topics including (but not limited to) reverse engineering, exploitation, binary analysis, and web.

Prerequisite

Operating systems or equivalent (e.g., CS 3210 at GT).

Class Meetings

This is a fully online course. Modules and labs open at 8:00 AM Eastern on Fridays unless otherwise noted. Please see the Schedule page for the detailed release and due dates, and check Canvas for official updates.

Office Hours and Recitation

We have optional recitations / office hours every week.

  • Times (Eastern): Monday 2-3 PM, Tuesday 3-4 PM

  • Location: Check Canvas for Zoom link

Who should take CS 6265-seclab?

CS 6265 is primarily intended for motivated seniors and graduate students who are interested in learning the skill sets necessary to participate in CTF competitions (e.g., DEFCON CTF).

Grading Policy

100% of your grade is determined by lab work. There are no midterm or final exams. If you don’t turn in at least one full lab, you will get an F. In other words, you must submit at least one flag per lab. Solving the tutorial counts, so if you solve all tutorials in all labs, you will not get an F. The precise point cutoffs will be announced on Canvas and/or Ed Discussion, but you can use the following approximate criteria as a guideline:

  • A: Average five or more challenges per lab, and all tutorials.

  • B: Average less than five but greater than four challenges per lab, and all tutorials.

  • C: Average less than four but greater than three challenges per lab, and all tutorials.

  • F: Zero flags submitted for at least one lab.

The expected grade distribution is 40% A, 30-40% B, and 20-30% C and below. Details about points can be found at General Rules.

Online Discussion

Online discussion is strongly encouraged and it will help you a lot in solving lab problems. Please log into Ed Discussion via Canvas and post your questions, ideas, and thoughts.

Misconduct Policy

CS 6265 provides a one week grace period for 50% points after each due date. We also strictly follow the cheating policy (read GT’s Academic Misconduct Policy).

Important

Cheating vs. collaboration

Collaboration is a very good thing. On the other hand, cheating is considered a very serious offense and is vigorously prosecuted. Vigorous prosecution requires that you be advised of the cheating policy of the course before the offending act.

For this semester, the policy is simple: don’t cheat:

  • Never share code or text on the project.

  • Never use someone else’s code or text in your solutions.

  • Never consult project code or text that might be on the Internet.

  • We don’t want to reach out to you years later and talk about DMCA or plagiarism

On the other hand, for this class, you are strongly encouraged to:

  • Share ideas.

  • Explain your code to someone to see if they know why it doesn’t work.

  • Help someone else debug if they’ve run into a wall.

If you obtain help of any kind, always write the name(s) of your sources.

(ref. http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse451/15au/)

Don’t publish or post your work online (e.g., on GitHub). Any violation of these rules will result in a course grade of F.

Staff/TA

  • TAs: Yu-Fu Fu, Mingyi Liu

  • Feel free to send us an email to make an appointment (mailto:staff)