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TDDD17 Information Security, Second Course

Course Literature

The course literature consists of the lectures handouts and the reading material prepared by the lecturers on this page. The literature marked with read for exam is mandatory for the exam, i.e. exam questions could cover any of the marked references. The un-marked literature is useful extra reading material.

The amount of mandatory reading material (number of pages) for each topic is approximately the same.

* Note that the lecture handouts are among the read for exam material.


1) Practical network security

Note: Some of the Wikipedia articles may include sections that have been broken out into other articles (currently, for example, "Firewall" links to "Stateful firewall"). You can recognize these from the link labeled "main article" at the beginning of each such section. These main articles are also included in read-for-exam.

Wikipedia articles (read for exam): Firewall (Computing), Application Layer Firewall, Proxy Server, Network Address Translation.

Network design

Mapping, attacks and vulnerabilities

Wireless security

IPSec and SSL/TLS

  • The main study material for IPSec and SSL/TLS is the slides for the Network Security part of the course, which are all read for exam .
  • The following material provides a more in-depth description of IPSec: An Illustrated Guide to IPsec. It may help in understanding the slides, but is not mandatory reading.
  • For full details of the IPSec protocol, refer to: Kent, BBN Corp, Atkinson and @Home Network. "RFC 2401: Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol".

2) Malware defense

The only mandatory reading material for the malware defense part of the course are the lecture slides.

As further reading for interested students, Joshua Saxe and Hillary Sanders: "Malware Data Science: Attack Detection and Attribution", 2018, No Starch Press provides a more in-depth introduction to machine learning for malware defense.


3) Privacy

Extra reading (for interested students)

  • Chaum, D. L. (1981). "Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM," 24(2), 84-90.
  • J. Camenisch and E. Van Herreweghen, "Design and implementation of the idemix anonymous credential system," in Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, New York, NY, USA, Nov. 2002, pp. 21-30. doi: 10.1145/586110.586114.
  • Simple understanding of the Zero-knowledge proof protocol - https://blog.goodaudience.com/understanding-zero-knowledge-proofs-through-simple-examples-df673f796d99

4) System security

For system security, the lecture handouts serve as the primary study material. You should focus on getting a high-level conceptual understanding of techniques and attacks (i.e. the "main ideas" and "big picture"), rather than learning technical details by heart. For example, the following is an example of a question that you are NOT likely to see on an exam:

In the context of Intel SGX, what does the acronym EPCM mean?

A more likely exam question could be more along the lines of:

Can technology A protect from attack X? Explain why or why not.

Trusted computing

The following articles may help you to better understand the material in the slides:

OS security

  • Make sure you understand the concepts of MAC and DAC from the basic secuirty course, as well as the Biba and Bell-LaPadula security models. read for exam
  • Role-based access control on Wikipedia. read for exam
  • Read about the 8 secure design principles by Saltzer and Schroeder. You only need to understand the design principles a-h in section I-A 3) "Design Principles". The rest of the paper is not mandatory reading. You should, however, be able to relate the design principles to real-life situations. (Note that the definition of the "Separation of privilege" principle here is different than the definition used by Robert during his lecture. We will use the definition in the article by Saltzer and Schroeder on the exam.) read for exam
  • You should also have a conceptual understanding of attacks mentioned in the slides. The following Wikipedia articles give some more details on two attack types:


Page responsible: Ulf Kargén
Last updated: 2023-02-13