Security is pervasive: it impacts everything around us. Security is 
also never ending: as researchers in other fields build new systems, 
security concerns come along with it. At the center of security is the 
security of systems, i.e., security you can touch. This course explores 
seminal and recent papers on attacking and defending systems. Papers 
covered focus on application security, IOT security, and hardware security. 

The goal of this semester's offering (Sp20) is to survey research addressing 
the security of the lowest layer of all systems that we interact with---the hardware. 
If the hardware the underpins the software that we rely on is insecure, then the 
entire system is insecure. Due to the exponential increase in cost to create the 
latest and greatest chips making it infeasible for even the United States to produce 
their own chips and political tensions between China and the United States, there is no 
more important time to address hardware security than now.

To that end, this course will provide a foundation for future work in hardware and 
low-level system security. The main deliverable for the course will be a single, 
whole-class, survey paper that systematizes existing attacks and defenses in hardware 
security and identifies unaddressed threat vectors. As a part of the paper development 
process, students will be responsible for presenting several papers to the class as well 
as contextualizing them in the form of an annotated bibliography. The class will work 
together to stitch these annotated bibliographies together to form a single, cohesive, survey paper. 

Prerequisites: CS 5204 OR CS 5214