Application Security (Sommersemester 2021)

Lecturer: Dr. Anne Kayem (Internet-Technologien und -Systeme)

General Information

Weekly Hours: 4
Credits: 6
Graded: yes
Enrolment Deadline: 18.03.2021 - 09.04.2021
Teaching Form: Lecture
Enrolment Type: Compulsory Module
Course Language: English

Programs, Module Groups & Modules

Cybersecurity MA

Description

Software applications have become an integral part of daily life, sharing information across devices pervasively and seamlessly to conduct and ever growing number of computing operations. One of the results of software application ubiquity is the complexity of designing and maintaining these applications in ways that guarantee security in addition to reliability and availability. Main stream press examples of data and application breaches such as the case of the MyFitnessPal security breach in 2018 that resulted in hackers acquiring the private data of more than 150 million users, underline the importance of secure design and coding. The goal of this course therefore, is to learn how to identify, fix, and prevent security vulnerabilities.

In order to achieve this, we will study the principles, methods, and approaches needed for the development of secure applications such as web, mobile, and classic applications. This will be achieved through a series of twice weekly lectures during the winter semester, focused on studying methods of analysing software applications to identify and analyse vulnerability classes and corresponding attack vectors on a theoretical as well as practical level.

Topics to be covered include:

Confidentiality, privacy and trust management
Secure databases
Secure distributed systems
Flaws (Vulnerabilities) in Applications
Threats and Attack Vectors
Data Flow and Interprocedural Analysis
...

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Course Schedule:

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Block 1: Preliminaries

Lecture 1: 13.04.2021 - Introduction & Course Overview
Lecture 2: 14.04.2021 - Notions of Condentiality, Privacy, and Trust Management
Lecture 3: 20.04.2021 - Secure Software Design and Development
Lecture 4: 21.04.2021 - Threats and Attack Vectors

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Block 2: Identifying Security Flaws in Applications

Lecture 5: 27.04.2021 - Vulnerability Analysis and Errors
Lecture 6: 28.04.2021 - Parsing and Sensitive Data Exposure
Lecture 7: 04.05.2021 - Security Misconguration
Lecture 8: 05.05.2021 - Insecure Direct Object References

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Block 3: Context-Sensitive Vulnerability Analysis

Lecture 9: 11.05.2021 - Beyond Syntax in Vulnerability Analysis
Lecture 10: 12.05.2021 - Information Disclosure and Data Tampering
Lecture 11: 18.05.2021 - Denial of Service
Lecture 12: 19.05.2021 - Buffer Overflows

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Block 4: Data Flow Analysis and Secure Coding

Lecture 13: 25.05.2021 - Data Flow Abstraction for Vulnerability Analysis
Lecture 14: 26.05.2021 - Eliminating Redundancies and Loops

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Lecture 15: 01.06.2021 - Mid-Semester Presentations (Group I)
Lecture 16: 02.06.2021 - Mid-Semester Presentations (Group II)

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Lecture 17: 08.06.2021 - Principles of Secure Coding
Lecture 18: 09.06.2021 - Identifying Security Vulnerabilities
Lecture 19: 15.06.2021 - Identifying Security Vulnerabilities in C/C++ Programming
Lecture 20: 16.06.2021 - Exploiting and Securing Vulnerabilities in Java Applications

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Block 5: Interprocedural Analysis

Lecture 21: 22.06.2021 - Call Graphs, Context Sensitivity & Vulnerabilities
Lecture 22: 23.06.2021 - Context Sensitive Security and Analysis
Lecture 23: 29.06.2021 - Context-Sensitive Inter-Application Analysis
Lecture 24: 30.06.2021 - Data Flow Analysis
Lecture 25: 06.07.2021 - Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
Lecture 26: 07.07.2021 - Secure Programming - Best Practices

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Lecture 27: 13.07.2021 - Final Presentations (Group I)
Lecture 28: 14.07.2021 - Final Presentations (Group II)

Requirements

Prerequisites:

Algorithms and Data Structures
Programming skills in any one (or several) of the following: C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript, PHP, and SQL

Literature

References and Study Material will be provided on a per lecture basis.

Learning

At the end of this course you should be able to do the following:

Critically assess applications for robustness to security vulnerabilities at dierent stages of the application's lifecycle such as design, implementation, maintenance, and upgrades
Design secure applications by adopting secure by design principles
Critically analyse applications for security flaws and threats
Design features to counter identied threats

Examination

Evaluations towards the final grade, will be based on presentations of coursework project results (mid-point and final), as well as an exam. Presentations will count for 50% and the exam for 50%. The grading rubric is summarised below:

Grading Rubric	When? & Where?	Grade %
Mid-Semester Presentation	Online via Zoom (01.06.2021 & 02.06.2021)	20%
Final Presentation	Online via Zoom. (13.07.2021 & 14.07.2021)	30%
Exam (Take-Home)	Submission on Moodle (26.07 @12noon - 29.07.2021 @12 noon )	50%

Dates

Over the Summer Semester (13.04.2021 - 23.07.2021), lectures will be organised on a twice (2X) weekly basis as follows:

Weekday	Time	Location
Tuesdays	09.15 - 10.45	Online (Zoom)
Wednesdays	11.00 - 12.30	Online (Zoom)

Lecture materials and further details on the course will be accessible on Moodle.

Note: To participate in the course you must be registered on the University of Potsdam's Moodle platform, and have registered to attend this course. Search for the course using "Application Security (Summer Semester)" or "AS-SoSe-202_1" and enroll using "AS-SoSe-2021".

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