Proactive Computer Security (PCS)

After completing the course, the successful student will have:

Knowledge of

• Fuzzing, stack and heap buffer overflows, shellcode, reverse engineering.
• Details of the interaction between user programs and the operating system.
• Tools used for IT security, especially reverse engineering.
• Vulnerabilities and how to correct them and/or mitigate attacks against them.

Skills to

• Analyse simple applications from a security perspective, locate vulnerabilities, and demonstrate how to rectify them.
• Describe and apply exploitation techniques such as return-oriented programming and stack and heap buffer overflows, as well as counter mechanisms.
• Do basic reverse engineering of binary programs and locate vulnerabilities.
• Understand the link between vulnerabilities in binary programs and the insecure source code that produce them.
• Recognise insecure source code and suggest corrections.
• Use and develop shellcode.
• Determine a vulnerability by reviewing an exploit of it, and suggest corrections.

Competences to

• Find and evaluate security issues using fuzzing, reverse engineering, and source code auditing.