In the press and in popular movies we hear and see that hackers break into critical systems, get access to classified information and trace your network activities with just a few clicks of a button. But are such scenarios real? How do attacks look like, how can we protect against such attacks and how can we securely exchange data over the Internet?
This course is intended for students with a solid understanding of networking who want to learn about network attacks, how those attacks can be measured and what can be done in terms of mitigation and defense.
It was designed for students following a M.Sc. program in the area of Computer Science, but can also be followed by students at the end of their B.Sc. or start of their Ph.D. program.
To follow this course, some basic programming skills (C, Java, ...) are required. In addition, you should be able to use Linux systems and set-up and maintain Virtual Machines (VirtualBox, Vagrant, Ubuntu).
Anna Sperotto is associate professor at the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the University of Twente. Her research interests are network monitoring and modeling, intrusion detection, network security, and network management.
Roland van Rijswijk-Deij is professor of measurement-based Internet Security in the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Maths and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente. His research focuses on defending the Internet against malicious activity and on strengthening the security and resilience of the Internet by improving protocols and operations, and the deployment of new security protocols and mechanisms. He uses an empirical approach to these challenges by performing global Internet-scale passive and active measurements.
Mattijs Jonker is assistant professor at the professor at the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the University of Twente. His research is on network security in the broad sense and involves extensive data science and Internet measurement.
Raffaele Sommese is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente. His doctoral research focuses on DNS resiliency and involves analyzing and characterizing DDoS attacks against DNS, investigating DNS misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and quantifying existing as well as devising new countermeasures to mitigate attacks against DNS infrastructures.
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On the Internet and YouTube you can find many videos and other resources that explain how to setup and use VirtualBox. Once VirtualBox is installed and tested, you should install Vagrant, for which you can also find many resources on the Internet. Note that you don't have to create any vagrant configuration files; such files will be provided to you as part of the course.
Occasionaly we find that problems occur while installing and using the VM. Sometimes problems are caused by outdated equipment, such as 10 year old laptops. In such cases you should try to arrange a newer machine, and try on that machine if the problems are gone. Problems may also occur if (Linux) kernel extensions are installed, such as grsec. In such cases some tweaking of configurations and options may solve the problems. Finally we sometimes observe that, especially with Windows systems, shared directories between guest and host OS may not work. This may be due to timing issues, and sometimes a restart of the VM solves the problem.