Offensive Technologies (2016/2017)

This course is one of the security courses of the Security Group in Trento.

It is offered in the framework of the Security and Privacy Master| of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (ICT Labs).

It is also available in the normalMaster Degree in Computer Science and in Communication Engineering at the University of Trento.

Please se the current course on Offensive Technologies for up to date information.

The course aims at advancing students’ concrete knowledge of attacks on operating systems, networks, and applications witha significant spur of creativity. Security notices (and even proof of concept exploits) are a little more than research ideas. They tells that something may be possible but do not explain the details (for obviosu security reasons). The students must use their creativity to understand what can possibly work and transforms the gaps and holes in the description into a workable product.

This course is also part of the 10K students , an European (so far) initiative to improve cyber-security education.

The goal of the 2016/2017 course is from Vulnerabilities to Exploit.

This course will be divided in essentially two tracks: analytic and technical.

The technical track will include the actual development of the exploit an a successful grade will mean that the student has been able to successful craft his or her own exploit. In the analytic track students will analyze other exploits from the wild and discuss their similarities.

This is a practical hand-on course. There would be few lectures and mostly they would be presentations by students themselves to report how they are going.

The course include having access to software that may be used to damage other people's computers. Hence, students who wishes to particpate to this course must sign an ethical code of conduct and a non-disclosure agreement.

Qualification for the Course

In order to be admitted to the course students will have to pass the following lab exercises

• Identify actual vulnerabilities from a sample of source code (when given an indication of the type of vulnerabilities and the fragment of the source code) - Exercise to be held on Wed.21 (See Schedule)
• be able to install an exploit kit and launch an attack (when given the actual general instruction to do so) - Exercises to be held on Wed.28 (See schedule)

Admission to the course is guaranteed if at least 50% of BOTH exercises is completed by the student (at least 2 vulnerabilities approximately identified AND the completed setup of the first exploit kit, bleeding life).

This is an eligible course. This course is available for 12 ECTS Credits.

• Fabio Massacci (fabio.massacci@unitn.it)
• Luca Allodi
• Stanislav Dashevski

Other material is available in Google Classroom or in the Malware Lab Shares.