When & Where

The first exam will be held in our regular classroom on Monday, October 6, 2025.

It will take up about half the lecture, starting approximately during the second half of the class period. Please arrive on time and do not plan on coming in just to take the exam. If you arrive after the exam has started, you will not be allowed to take it.

Exam rules

Be sure to arrive on time. If you arrive after the exam starts, you will not be allowed to take it.

This will be a closed book, closed notes exam. Calculators, phones, augmented reality glasses, laptops, and tablets are neither needed nor permitted. If you have these devices, you must turn them off, put them out of sight, and not access them for the duration of the exam.

No other electronic devices are permitted except for hearing aids, pacemakers, electronic nerve stimulators, other implanted medical devices, or electronic watches that function only as timekeeping devices or chronographs.

Bring a couple of pens or pencils with you. Plan to use a pen only if you are supremely confident in not changing your mind about your answers. . Check here for information about pencils, sharpeners, and the craft of pencil sharpening.

Past exams

You can use my past exams as a guide to what this exam may look like, but realize there are differences in topics and in the sequencing of the topics. Expect around 25 multiple-choice questions. I do not refer to old exams when I come up with a new one, so it is likely that many of the topics that I considered important in past exams will show up on future exams. Some material may have changed, however, so do not worry about questions that appear to relate to topics we have not covered.

Get past 419 exams here.

Study guide

You are responsible for the material from the first four lectures and recitations.

The study guide is a concatenation of the study guides from the past lectures. It attempts to cover most of the material you should know. It is not a substitute for the lectures, lecture material, and other reading matter. All the material may not be in the guide. My goal is to put most of the information you need to know a concise with fewer elaborations.

You can also prepare your own guide, which would be a much better way to prepare for the exam!

→ Get the study guide

Topics

Topics that you should know and may be on the exam include:

Introduction

• What is computer security? Know the terms

  • CIA Triad

  • Confidentiality

  • Privacy, Anonymity, Secrecy

  • Understand how privacy relates to confidentiality

  • Integrity

    • Data integrity

    • Origin/destination (endpoint) integrity

    • System integrity

  • Availability

• Security goals

  • Prevention

  • Detection

  • Recovery

• Policy vs. Mechanism

• Security engineering

• Risk Analysis

• Trustworthy components

• Assurance

• Defense in Depth (from homework 1)

• Supply Chain Attack

• Trusted Computing Base (TCB)

  • You don't have to know Meldown, Spectre, Rowhammer

• Definitions

  • Exfiltration

  • Principal

  • Subject

  • Vulnerability

  • Exploit

  • Attack, attack vector, attack surface

  • Threat, threat actor

• Purpose of a threat model

• Threat categories (know but don't memorize)

  • Disclosure

  • Deception

    • Disruption

    • Usurpation

• Examples of threats

  • Snooping

  • Modification

  • Alteration

  • Repudiation of origin

  • Denial of receipt

  • Delay

  • Denial of service (DoS)

• You don't have to know internet-enabled threats

• Black hat, gray hat, white hat hackers

• Types of attackers:

  • opportunistic, targeted

  • script kiddies, advanced persistent threat (APT)

  • You don't need to know APT naming conventions

• Purpose of CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)

• Purpose of CVSS

Symmetric cryptography

• Terms:

  • authentication, integrity, nonrepudiation, confidentiality

  • plaintext, encryption, ciphertext, decryption, cipher

  • secret algorithm, symmetric cipher, key

• Schneier's Law

• Kerckhoffs's principle

• Recognize these properties:

  • Randomness (high entropy)

  • Non-invertible without a key

  • Large keys

  • No weak keys

  • Ciphertext size is the same magnitude as plaintext

  • Extensively analyzed

  • Impact of key length

• Shannon entropy? (You don't need to know the formula, just the concept)

• Classic cryptography

  • Monoalphabetic substitution cipher; shift cipher (Caesar cipher)

  • Attacks: frequency analysis

    • digraphs, trigraphs

  • Polyalphabetic substitution cipher: Alberti, Vigenère cipher

    • Why is it better than a monoalphabetic substitution cipher?

• What is a rotor machine?

  • Know it's a symmetric polyalphabetic cipher

  • Understand what each rotor does

• Transposition cipher: Have a basic idea of what it does

  • What's a scytale?

  • Columnar transposition cipher

• You don’t have to know ADFGVX or Playfair

• One-time pad: why is it so secure?

• What is perfect secrecy and what is needed to achieve it?

• What is a stream cipher and a keystream?

• CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator)

• Confusion and diffusion

• What is a block cipher?

  • What is meant by an iterative cipher and multiple rounds?

  • What is a subkey?

  • What is meant by substitution-permutation?

  • What is an s-box?

  • What is the general idea behind a Feistel cipher?

  • What is an SP-Network?

  • I will not ask you how DES works but know it's a Feistel cipher

  • DES vs. 3DES

  • I will not ask you how AES works but know it's an SP-Network

• Block cipher modes

  • Electronic Code Book mode (ECB) - problems with using it

  • Cipher Block Chaining mode (CBC)

  • Counter mode (CTR)

• Initialization Vector (IV)

• Know the basic idea of AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) concept

• ChaCha20

• I will not ask about cryptoanalytic attacks

Public Key Cryptography & Integrity

• Key distribution problem

• One-way function

  • Definition

  • Examples: discrete logarithms, middle squares

• Trapdoor function

• Public-key cryptography

• Roles of public and private keys

• RSA

  • You don’t have to know the RSA algorithm

  • Know that its difficulty is based on not knowing any efficient methods to factor a product of two prime numbers

  • Know that encryption and decryption are operations of the form m^emod n.

• ECC

  • You don’t have to know elliptic curves or the algorithm

  • Know that its difficulty is based on computing discrete logarithms

  • Advantages over RSA

• Cryptographic hash functions

• Understand the properties of a hash function:

  • Fixed-length

  • Preimage resistance

  • Second preimage resistance

  • Collision resistance

  • Avalanche effect

• Recognize these as hash functions SHA-1, MD5, SHA-2 (SHA-256, SHA-512), bcrypt

• You don’t need to know the implementations of any hash functions

• Hash collisions

• Pigeonhole principle

• Main point from the birthday paradox

• Message Authentication Code (MAC, keyed hash)

• HMAC: you don’t need to know the formula but just the basic idea that the hash is f(key, message)

• CBC-MAC

• Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) - just the concept (as in the week 2)

  • Recognize GCM and Poly1305 as the integrity components to encryption

• Digital signature

• What’s the general concept of signing? (Encrypt a hash of a message with a private key.)

• What’s the general concept of verifying? (Compare a hash of a message with the signature decrypted with a public key.)

• a hash with a private key)?

• X.509 Certificates

  • What is the purpose of a digital certificate?

  • What is a Certificate Authority (CA)?

• I won’t ask about code integrity

• Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE)

  • What is the purpose?

  • How are its public & private keys used?

  • What one-way function is it based on? a^xmod. p

  • You don't have to know the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) algorithm. Just know it behaves just like the regular Diffie-Hellman algorithm

• What is a hybrid cryptosystem?

  • What is a long-term key?

  • What is a session key?

  • What is forward secrecy?

  • What is an ephemeral key used for?

• Quantum attacks

  • I won’t ask about post-quantum cryptography algorithms

  • Understand why they were developed

  • Which algorithms are at risk of quantum attacks?

• Transport Layer Security (TLS)

  • You don’t have to know the flow but know what it uses: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, X.509 certificates, public key cryptography, HMAC, symmetric cryptography with AEAD

  • Purpose of HKDF (HMAC-based Key Derivation Function)

Data Integrity

• What is meant by a one-way function?

• What is a cryptographic hash function?

  • What are the properties of a cryptographic hash function?

  • What is pre-image resistance?

  • What is the avalanche effecct

  • What does it mean to be collision resistant?

  • How do the birthday paradox and the pigeonhole principle tell us about hash functions? (You don't need to know the probability formula)

  • I will not ask you about the difference between strong and weak collision resistance

• I will not ask you how SHA-1 or SHA-2 work (or any hash functions)

• Message Authentication Codes

  • What is a Message Authentication Code (MAC, or keyed hash)?

  • I will not ask you the formula for HMAC but understand it's based on hashing the message and a secret key

  • Understand what a CBC-MAC is

• Digital signatures

  • What is a digital signature (logically)? How can you create one?

  • What are the properties of a digital signature?

  • What are the three basic operations you need to create and use digital signatures?

• What is a session key?

• How can a public key serve as an anonymous identity?

• X.509 Certificates

  • How do certificates serve as non-anonymous identities?

  • Understand that a certificate contains identifying information, a public key, the CA's identification, and CA's signature

  • What is a CA (Certification Authority)?

  • What is certificate revocation?

• Signed software

  • Understand the principle

  • Advantage of per-page signatures

Combined authentication and key exchange protocols

• Security protocol notation

• How does a trusted third party play a role in combined authentication and key exchange?

• What is mutual authentication?

• Challenge-response concept and use of nonces for authenticating

• What is a replay attack?

• How is challenge-response used to authenticate via public keys?

• Diffie-Hellman key exchange (see earlier notes)

• Needham-Schroeder: understand the value of adding a nonce

• Understand the value of adding a timestamp (you don't have to remember the names Denning-Sacco or the steps of the protocol

• Understand the value of using session IDs (you don't have to remember the names Otway-Rees or the steps of the protocol)

• Kerberos

  • You don't have to know the protocol in detail but understand the phases and data you get

  • Role of the Kerberos Authentication Server (AS)

  • Role of the Kerberos Ticket Granting Server (TGS)

  • Why was Kerberos split into AS+TGS?

  • Understand that you get an encrypted session key and a ticket

  • Understand what a ticket is (basically, the same session key encrypted for the service)

  • You don't have to know the kinit command

Authentication

• Distinction between identification, authentication, & authorization

• What are the three factors of authentication?

• What is multi-factor authentication (MFA)?

• Password Authentication Protocol

  • How does it work?

  • What are the security problems?

  • You don't have to know the NIST recommendations for passwords

  • Hashed passwords

  • Dictionary vs. brute force attacks

  • Rainbow tables (Precomputed hashes)

  • Salt

  • Credential stuffing & password spraying attacks

• Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) - what problem does it solve?

• One-time Passwords

  • Sequence-based

    • S/key: understand how one-way functions can be used to create a list of one-time passwords

    • You don't have to know OPIE (One-time Passwords In Everything)

  • Challenge-based

    • (same steps as CHAP)

    • What makes it secure over a network?

    • Passkey authentication - how does it work and use public keys?

  • Time-based and hash-based

    • Have a basic understanding of how time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) work: f(time, key)

    • I will not ask about Yubikey or SecurID (we didn't cover those)

    • The difference between TOTP and HOTP (note that they really should have called HOTP counter-based one-time passwords since both TOTP and HOTP use hashing or one-way functions).

• Second factor issues

  • Push authentications

  • MFA fatigue (Push authentication fatigue)

  • Number matching authentication (NMA)

• What is an Adversary in the Middle (AitM) attack?

• I won’t ask about risk-based authentication

Biometric Authentication

• How does pattern recognition apply to biometrics?

• How do _thresholds apply to biometrics?

• False accept rate (FAR) vs. false reject rate (FRR)

• Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) plot

• Behavioral factors

• Fingerprint minutiae

• Robustness vs. distinctiveness

• Authentication process: enrollment, sensing, feature extraction, pattern matching, decision

• Challenges:

  • trusted devices and data path

  • human liveness

  • tamper-proof devices and secure communications

  • thresholds

  • compartmentalization

  • theft of biometric

• Cooperative vs. non-cooperative systems

Last update: Tue Sep 30 16:01:23 2025