Network Security

Description:

The course introduces different aspects of system and network security.

The course focuses on Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA)  architectures and primitives: challenge/response, nonces, mutual  authentication schemes, perfect forward secrecy, timestamps. TCP-based authentication protocols, and sequence number prediction.

In addition, a subset of the following complementary topics is covered:

• Basics on cryptography and integrity. hash functions, public/private keys, shift encryption, secret key cryptography, public key cryptography, public key certificate, Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
• Securing virtual environments, programming in Python language and use of Linux Operating System. Managing access rights to a system and defining firewall rules. Virtual private networks.
• Usage of application’s vulnerabilities to remotely break into a system, reproducing the man-in-the-middle attack using flaws in the ARP protocol and attacking the DHCP service.
• Intrusion detection systems.
• Operating systems security.
• AI methods to secure networks (e.g. intrusion detection and prevention systems, traffic classification and filtering for DDoS, …)? Methods (for example from the field of anomaly detection, e.g. isolation forests)
• Attacks on AI systems (e.g. adversarial examples, malicious patches, prompt injection in LLMs, …)
• Usage of AI systems for attacks? (Coding of malware using AI, use of LLMs to generate phishing emails, …)