CSE 484: Computer Security (Winter 2021)

Course Location and Time

• Lecture: MWF 2:30-3:20pm PT, via Zoom (access via the Zoom tab on the course Canvas page)
• Sections:
• Section AA: Th 12:30-1:20pm, via Zoom
• Section AB: Th 1:30-2:20pm, via Zoom
• Section AC: Th 2:30-3:20pm, via Zoom

Course Staff

Instructor: Prof. David Kohlbrenner (dkohlbre@cs)

Teaching Assistants:

• Wenqing Lan, TA - lanw3@cs
• Keanu Vestil, TA - keanu@cs
• Bowen Xu, TA - bwx074@cs
• Sherry Yang, TA - yunqi54@cs
• Tanish Kapur, TA - tan33sh@cs
• Khushi Chaudhari, TA - khushic@cs

Email everyone (preferred method to reach staff): cse484-tas@cs.washington.edu

Discussion Board

Ed Discussion Board

Office Hours

See Canvas for all OH Zoom links.

• David: Mondays, 3:30am-4:30pm PT, via Zoom
  • 1/18/21 Moved to 1/19/21 at 9:30-10:30am PT via Zoom


• TA Office Hours:
• Wenqing, Khushi, Bowen: Tuesdays, 2-3pm, via Zoom
• Tanish, Keanu, Sherry: Wednesdays, 11am-12, via Zoom
• Bowen, Khushi, Tanish: Thursdays, 10-11am, via Zoom
• Sherry, Keanu, Wenqing: Fridays, 10:30-11:30am, via Zoom

Optional Textbook

Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know, Daswani, Kern, and Kesavan, ISBN 1-59059-784-2

You can find it online through the UW Libraries here.

Topics

In this course, we will cover topics including: the "security mindset", threat modeling, software security, cryptography, malware, web security, web privacy, smartphone security, authentication, usable security, anonymity, physical security, and security for emerging technologies.

For more details, see the course schedule.

Prerequisites

CSE 332 and CSE 351

You should have maturity in both the mathematics of computer science and in the engineering of computer systems. This means that you should: have a good understanding of data structures and algorithms; be comfortable writing programs from scratch in C and Java; be comfortable writing and debugging assembly code; and be comfortable in a command-line Unix development environment (gdb, gcc, etc). You should also have a good understanding of computer architecture, operating systems, and computer networks. Most importantly, you should be eager to challenge yourself and learn more!