Reading List for System Security Qual

Overview

Students taking the security quals are required to read the following list of books and papers. The qual is a 30 minutes oral exam where topics from this reading list will be discussed. Please contact Dan Boneh to schedule the exam.

Papers

(State of) The Art of War: Offensive Techniques in Binary Analysis, Y. Shoshitaishvili, R. Wang, C. Salls, N. Stephens, M. Polino,A. Dutcher, J. Grosen, S. Feng, C. Hauser, C. Kruegel, and G. Vigna, 2016
Inside the slammer worm, D. Moore, V. Paxson, S. Savage, C. Shannon, S. Staniford, N. Weaver, IEEE Security and Privacy, 4(1), July 2003, pp. 33-39.
Return-Oriented Programming: Systems, Languages, and Applications, R. Roemer, E. Buchanan, H. Shacham, and S. Savage. ACM Trans. Info. & Sys. Security 15(1):2, Mar. 2012
Deep Packer Inspection: A Longitudinal Study of the Complexity of Run-Time Packers, X. Ugarte-Pedrero, D. Balzarotti, I. Santos Grueiro, P. Garcia Bringas, 2015
Processor security: Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution, Paul Kocher, et al., 2019

Control-flow integrity principles, implementations, and applications, M. Abadi, M. Budiu, U. Erlingsson, J. Ligatti. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security 13: 1, 2009
Eternal War in Memory, Laszlo Szekeres, Mathias Payer, Tao We, Dawn Song, 2013
Using Programmer-Written Compiler Extensions to Catch Security Holes, Ken Ashcraft, Dawson Engler, in IEEE Security and Privacy 2002.
All You Ever Wanted to Know About Dynamic Taint Analysis and Forward Symbolic Execution, E. Schwartz, T. Avgerinos, D. Brumley, 2010
System call interposition and seccomp
Ron Rivest, Cryptography. Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume A, pp. 717-755

A look back at Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, S. Bellovin, ACSAC 2004.
Paxson, Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time. Proc. 7th USENIX Security Symposium, San Antonio, TX, January 1998.
A survey of BGP security, K. Butler, T. Farley, P. McDaniel, and J. Rexford.

A Few Classics

Reflections on Trusting Trust, K. Thompson, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763.
Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation, R. Wahbe, S. Lucco, T. Anderson and S. Graham, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol 27, No 5, Dec 1993, pp 203-216.