Computer Security

Computer Security is a Level 9 course given in Semester 2. See the Course Catalogue entry.
Lectures are held on Mondays and Thursdays at 16:10, in Lecture Theatre 183, Old College.
The first lecture is on Mon 14th January. There will be no lecture on Thu 21st March.

Lecture Slides

Slides will be added below as we go along. The slides from last year will give a good idea about what's coming up.

1.	16 Jan.	Security landscape	view	print
2.	17 Jan.	Cryptography basics	view	print
3.	21 Jan.	Hash functions	view	print
4.	24 Jan.	Symmetric cryptography	view	print
5.	28 Jan.	Asymmetric cryptography	view	print
6.	31 Jan.	Digital signatures	view	print
7.	7 Feb.	Protocols I	view	print
8.	11 Feb.	Protocols II	view	print
9.	13 Feb.	Security models	view	print
10.	28 Feb.	Network and Internet vulnerabilities	view	print
11.	4 Mar.	Email and web security	view	print
12.	7 Mar.	Network and Internet defences	view	print
13.	11 Mar.	Programming securely	view	print
14.	14 Mar.	Programming securely II	view	print
15.	18 Mar.	Usable Security	view	print
16.	26 Mar.	Attack landscape and summary	view	print

These are lecture slides, not comprehensive notes. You should supplement the slides with notes taken in lectures, and from your own reading. References and specific reading recommendations are given in slides, further guidance is given in lectures. The examinable material consists of what is covered in lectures, tutorials and practicals (unless specifically excluded) and the reading recommended in lectures.

Course resources

Recommended reading & other references.

Tutorials

There are four tutorials. Tutorial groups are managed by the ITO, see the groups, times and rooms here. The first tutorial is on Thu 31st January.
There are worksheets for the first three tutorials, issued beforehand, which you should try before the tutorial meeting.

Tutorial Sheet 1 (Cryptography) will be considered at the Week 3 tutorials starting 31st Jan.
The solutions are here.
Tutorial Sheet 2 (Protocols) will be considered at the Week 5 tutorials starting 12th Feb.
The solutions are here.
Tutorial Sheet 3 (Access Control, Network, Programming) will be considered at the Week 7 tutorials starting 4th Mar.
The solutions are here.
Tutorial 4 will be in Week 9 starting 18th Mar.
There is no question sheet, the tutorial may cover (brief) feedback from the first practical, questions from earlier tutorials, and anything else that you raise with your tutor ahead of time.

Tutorials are based on question sheets which you should use to help guide your own study for the course. Solutions will be issued a while after the question sheets so you can measure your progress. There is not enough time to cover all topics; you should aim to cover remaining topics to a similar depth of knowledge.

Coursework Exercises

There are two assessed coursework exercises, each worth 12.5% of the final mark.

Cryptography and Protocols. Please submit your answers to the ITO by 8th March
Web Server and Application Security. Please submit your answers to the ITO by 19th March

Exams

Past papers are on the ITO pages.
The only solutions available are those already published.
Older exams include questions on "BAN logic" which has since been removed from the syllabus.

Documents above are in PDF format. Comments, suggestions, corrections are welcomed.
To print course materials, make sure your PDF reader has the correct page size and orientation.

Copyright: except where stated, lecture notes and other course materials are Copyright (C) School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and respective authors. Lecture slides prepared by David Aspinall, with additions by Mike Just and Julian Bradfield.
Please respect our rights over this material and contact us if you want to use it in another context.

Course Lecturer: David Aspinall david.aspinall@ed.ac.uk

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