Attack Presentations

For the first 10-15 minutes of most classes, student groups will present attacks that are relevant to that lecture (for example, when discussing user authentication, the group may present techniques for cracking CAPTCHAs).

09/04 5:00pm   Email Dave with:

  • Your group (1-2 people).
  • Your top five preferred attacks.
  • Dates during which your team can't present, if any.

For the presentation:

  • Describe the relevant background for the attack.
  • Demonstrate the attack live, or else show enough data/information for it to be clear that the attack has been launched.
  • Describe how this attack could be defended against.
  • Describe the challenges you faced and insights you gleaned from the attack.

Note All attacks must be performed in an ethical, safe manner; please see the discussion of legality and ethics in the syllabus.

Date Attack Attacker Description
08/28
08/30
09/04
09/06
09/11 TLS information leakage Erica Demonstrate the BEAST, CRIME, or Lucky 13 attacks against TLS.
09/13 Certificate mis-validation Daniel M. Demonstrate two examples of incorrect validation of a certificate with a modern browser of your choosing, such as not checking for revocations various attacks listed here.
09/18 Traffic deanonymization Lambros Demonstrate a traffic deanonymization attack on Tor, like the one described here.
09/20 Data deanonymization Marguerite Apply a deanonymization technique like the one here to the Netflix challenge dataset and demonstrate what information you can extract.
09/25 On-path censorship and evasion Michael R. Set up a (virtual) network with an "on-path" censor who can observe and inject (but not block) packets, and use this censor to respond with lemon DNS queries like here, or tear down connections like here. Demonstrate an evasion technique.
09/27 IoT device compromise Makana & Noel I will provide you with IoT devices of your choosing. Demonstrate an attack that allows you to run arbitrary code on them, like those described here, here, or here.
10/02 Cracking passwords Erin Obtain a publicly available dataset of password hashes and implement rainbow tables to crack the passwords.
10/04 Breaking CAPTCHAs Kevin Implement a tool that automatically solves CAPTCHAs, such as the attack on text-based ones described here and/or the one on audio-based ones described here. Demonstrate its use on an Alexa top-1000 site.
10/09 None
10/11 Project proposal presentations
10/16 None
10/18 Control flow attack P.B. Demonstrate a modern control flow attack against modern defenses such as DEP, ASLR, and Canaries.
10/23 Kernel-level rootkit Daniel K. Launch a kernel rootkit that hides from detection.
10/25 Cold-boot attack Aravind & Josephine Launch a cold-boot attack like the ones described here.
10/30 Attacking vulnerable websites Geoffrey Build a dummy website of your choice and demonstrate XSS, CSRF, and SQL injection attacks against it.
11/01 Tricking users George & Michael P. Build a malicious website of your choice that tricks users by (1) launching a clickjacking attack, (2) performing a picture-in-picture attack, and (3) performs an SSL stripping attack (MitM transparently proxies HTTP requests and rewrites HTTPS links to point to look-alike HTTP links).
11/06 Speculative execution attacks Corbin Launch a speculative execution attack like Meltdown, Spectre, or Foreshadow
11/08 Compiler Trojan horse Elijah Modify LLVM to create a malicious compiler as described here.
11/13 Kaminsky attack Louis-Henri Demonstrate the Kaminsky DNS cache poisoning attack on a dummy DNS server you run.
11/15 Opt-ACK Attack Bibhusa & Chen Demonstrate the optimistic acknowledgment attack on a small cluster of machines. Perform this across a wide-area network and discuss the rates you can achieve.
11/20 Malicious peripheral Omer I will provide you with a PIC32 microcontroller. Use this to interpose between a keyboard and a computer to capture keystrokes and filter out user passwords. When you provide a "secret knock", your malicious device should dump the data. Bonus: interpose between a computer and a printer to alter output of printed election results.
11/22 Thanksgiving Break
11/27 Rogue wireless AP Keshaw I will provide you with a OpenWRT access point. Modify its software to infect downloaded executables with malware.
11/29 Firmware-resident malware Spandan I will provide a digital camera; use the CHDK framework to install malicious code that does not allow the user to take pictures if you are in it (or if you are not in it, etc.). Other firmware attacks are also acceptable.
12/04 Project presentations
12/06 Project presentations

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