Topics in Software Security

Catalog description

This course investigates the state-of-the-art in software exploitation and defense. Specifically, the course is structured as a seminar where students present research papers to their peers. We will begin with a summary of prevalent software defects, typically found in applications written in memory unsafe languages, and proceed to surveying what we are up against: traditional and modern exploitation techniques, ranging from classical code injection and code reuse up to the newest goodies (JIT-ROP, Blind ROP). For the bulk part, we will focus on the latest advances in protection mechanisms, mitigation techniques, and tools against modern vulnerability classes and exploitation methods.