Admission requirements
Assumed prior knowledge
This course aims at students who want to gain a deep understanding of modern security issues in computer systems. We expect that students already have some background knowledge in security (e.g. have taken the Security course at the Bachelor level) and computer architectures (e.g. have taken the Computer Architecture course). We expect that students also have experience and skills in scientific writing, presenting, and collaborative research project management.
Description
Computer systems that communicate, process or store personal or company-critical data, need to be protected against attacks that undermine their security. These computer systems are used in diverse applications, ranging from low-energy sensor nodes in the Internet of Things, to high-performance servers in data centers. Therefore, security mechanisms need to adhere to the constraints imposed by the system with respect to energy consumption, performance, cost, etc. This course will concentrate on attacks and mitigations at the software and the hardware (processor) level, and will examine how these attacks and mitigations are constrained in real-world environments.
The first part of the course will focus on vulnerabilities and their mitigations at the software level. We will overview the most important code vulnerability types and will study the state-of-the-art techniques for identifying security issues at the software level, e.g., fuzzing, static and dynamic security analysis. We will also review the secure software development lifecycle.
The second part of the course covers attacks and protection mechanisms that specifically focus on the hardware of computer systems. We will study vulnerabilities in the computer architecture and the memory, as well as hardware-based roots of trust and security architectures.
Finally, the course will give students space to go more in-depth with their chosen software or system security topics. We will analyze the most recent, state-of-the-art publications on system and software security, and will work on group projects using state-of-the-art research tools.
Course objectives
After this course, you will:
Understand security vulnerabilities in software and computer systems.
Be familiar with the latest research results in system and software research.
Be able to compare and critically evaluate scientific studies on system and software security based on a set of well-formulated and objective metrics.
Be able to work with state-of-the-art tools and methods for securing software and systems in the relevant contexts.
Be able to design and execute a small-scale research study using state-of-the-art tools and methods related to software and system security.
Timetable
The most recent timetable can be found at the Computer Science (MSc) student website.
You will find the timetables for all courses and degree programmes of Leiden University in the tool MyTimetable (login). Any teaching activities that you have sucessfully registered for in MyStudyMap will automatically be displayed in MyTimeTable. Any timetables that you add manually, will be saved and automatically displayed the next time you sign in.
MyTimetable allows you to integrate your timetable with your calendar apps such as Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and other calendar apps on your smartphone. Any timetable changes will be automatically synced with your calendar. If you wish, you can also receive an email notification of the change. You can turn notifications on in ‘Settings’ (after login).
For more information, watch the video or go the the 'help-page' in MyTimetable. Please note: Joint Degree students Leiden/Delft have to merge their two different timetables into one. This video explains how to do this.
Mode of instruction
Lectures, peer presentation classes, workshops, self-study and group work.
Course load
Total hours of study: 168 hrs. (= 6 EC). Of those (ca.):
14 hrs of lectures
14 hrs of peer presentations and workshops
10 hrs of self-study (reading scientific literature)
30 hrs of research literature analysis
100 hrs of project work
Assessment method
Final grade = 30% Assignment 1 + 70% Assignment 2. There is no exam.
Details:
Assignment 1: paper analysis and presentation in a group of 2-4: papers/topics are proposed by the teachers. This assignment is not re-takeable; grade in case of non-completed assignment: 0.
Assignment 2: project for ca. 100 hours in a group of 2-4. Projects are defined by students jointly with lecturers, e.g., a replication study or propose a new application of the tool. Students present the project results, and also submit a short report (with a short literature review, motivation, project overview and discussion of results) and project artifacts (code, dataset, etc.) used in the project. There will be one resit opportunity for this assignment. Grade in case of non-completed assignment: 0.
For both assignments, all group members should actively participate in all project work components, including participating in presentations and writing reports.
We expect academic integrity from all students and all deliverables in the course, including, but not limited to, submitting own work only (and not produced by Generative AI techniques or copied from other people’s work), acknowledging sources of all quotes and figures, etc.
Reading list
There is no textbook. Recommended readings (research papers, etc.) will be announced on Brightspace.
Registration
From the academic year 2022-2023 on every student has to register for courses with the new enrollment tool MyStudyMap. There are two registration periods per year: registration for the fall semester opens in July and registration for the spring semester opens in December. Please see this page for more information.
Please note that it is compulsory to both preregister and confirm your participation for every exam and retake. Not being registered for a course means that you are not allowed to participate in the final exam of the course. Confirming your exam participation is possible until ten days before the exam.
Extensive FAQ's on MyStudymap can be found here.
Contact
- Contact the lecturers via email.
Remarks
None.