Foundations of Cybersecurity 1

Hi all,
Exam inspection is going to happen tomorrow in Zoom. Make sure you have read your exam feedback by then.

- If your last name begins with a letter from A to K, you can join us from 2 pm sharp till 2:50 pm.
- If your last name begins with a letter from L to Z, you can join us from 3 pm sharp till 3:50 pm.

As the call is moderated you will probably have to wait until we let you in.
See you tomorrow.

The results for your exams are now available, thanks to a big effort by the tutors. Overall, the feeling students mentioned about the amount of tasks was correct and we have reacted accordingly. As you will see from the gradescale table, the limit for passing the exam is 40/120 points and the 1.0 was awarded from 80/120 points upward. We will adjust the backup exam accordingly to have ~1/3 less tasks. I want to stress again that it was very hard to judge the effort up front, since all prior experience with exams were regular written exams.

I would like to note that based on the regulations, you can improve your grade once if you have passed, but only within the same semester. That is, if you passed, but are not happy with your grade, you can improve it in the backup exam. If you have not passed and pass the backup exam, you cannot improve your grade.

The tutor's feedback for your submission is visible in the CMS. We will do a "exam inspection" of sorts on Wednesday (details to follow). Please take a look at your feedback and if you either do not understand a certain point in the grading or disagree with it, come to the exam inspection. 

We received a number of posts through the feedback form about the amount of exercises in the exam. As already mentioned in the Askbot post, we are aware of this and will adjust the grading accordingly. Naturally, having to switch from well-rehearsed written in-person exams to open book exams for which you can't simply google the solutions is non-trivial. Note that, assuming that all of you struggled given the time constraints, we will fairly grade it, also taking into account the usual passing rates and average grades we saw in previous years.

I apologize if this put you under more stress than necessary.

Good morning all,

As we start the main exam in ~7 minutes, we hope you are all well rested and prepared. If and only if you have any important questions or any other serious concern during the exam, join us in the zoom chat at: https://cispa-de.zoom.us/j/95955221230?pwd=OTNYVFBGaHgwdm5vL2sxV3dDS0s2UT09

Note that the call may be moderated, so you will likely have to wait to be let in.

Good luck with the exam!

For tomorrow's exam, you will have to attest to the fact that you are willing and able to take the exam. For that, Nico has built a small Web app which asks for this. For everyone attending the exam, there is a link now in your "Personal Status" page. Please ensure that the link works already now (and you do not get any errors). If everything works, this should show you the time remaining until the exam. Should there be an error and you believe to have registered for the exam, contact Nico right away.

Also, I have some news for the backup exam. My original plan was to have an in-person main exam on April 1 and then oral backup exams on April 15. Both would have required you to study the material and be able to answer questions from your memory. Since we have changed the format of the main exam to be open book, having a closed-book exam after does not allow for a fair comparison of results. Therefore, the backup exam will also be an open book written exam. The registration through the CMS will be possible after we have announced the results of the main exam. Note that only registration and unregistration through the CMS will count. If you fail to register in time, you will not be able to take the backup exam. If you fail to unregister in time, this will count as a failed attempt at the exam.

Finally, as far as the exam results, we will upload the graded submissions to the CMS for you to look at. You will be given the option to discuss grading early next week, details will follow. 

Hello there,

we, the Capture-the-Flag Team saarsec, consisting of students and lecturers from Saarland University, are giving a workshop to familiarize students with Capture-the-Flag competitions as well as attacking and defending against security vulnerabilities. CTFs are a great way to actually fiddle around with the practical details of mounting attacks and defenses that were theoretically discussed during your studies. This practical experience can not only be beneficial for your studies but also come in handy during later stages of your career. The workshop starts with a short introduction to Linux, followed by different topics such as File Inclusions, SQL Injections, and Command Injections. For each topic, we will discuss how we can find these vulnerabilities, exploit them on a large scale, and how we can fix them. Then, for each each topic, you'll spend more than 50% of the time in each slot on actual challenges.

At the end, we will host a CTF for all workshop participants where they can use their newly acquired skills against each other.

 

FAQ:

Q: When and where?

A: April 10th and 11th, entirely virtually

Q: Requirements?

A: We do not require any certain skills as we will start with the basics. However, the knowledge from Cysec1 or Security is definitely an advantage.

Q: Sounds awesome! Where can I register or get more information?

A: https://workshop.saarsec.rocks

See you there,

saarsec

Hello all together,
As already announced, we are going to offer an additional tutorial as exam preparation tomorrow at 2pm in Zoom.

For the same reason, the tutors prepared some tasks which are going to serve us as example exam:

On your personal page, tomorrow, you are going to find a link you can access the tasks with from 11:30am on. You then got 2 hours + 30 minutes to upload your solution to the CMS. 
Please note these tasks are neither corrected, nor time-aligned. This only serves as preparation and showcase for the main exam.
 

Hi all,

I have decided to not do the exam in person. We will have an open-book exam on April 1 and it will start at 9am. Before that, you'll all get a link to your exam through the CMS. You will have 120 minutes to write the exam and then an additional 30 minutes to digitize and upload your answers to the CMS. Please note that you have to sign up one week before the date through the LSF. If you fail to meet the deadline, you cannot take the exam. This just as an early heads-up to what is coming.

TLDR; open-book exam April 1, 9-11, 11:30 deadline for uploading the answers to CMS.

Hi all,

I hope you are keeping safe and have been successful with exams thus far (if you had any). I received the evaluation results last week and have uploaded them to the Materials section. I am extremely happy to see such a positive rating of the lecture, especially considering the weird circumstances of no visual feedback for me, and the even weirder circumstances for the first term "at" the university for all of you. I hope that I will not need to take the Zoom-related suggestions for improvement into account in the next term, assuming that the situation normalizes a bit and we can all go back to in-person teaching.

Looking at the number of students who provided feedback, this was comparatively low (31 participants). If you did not participate or have additional feedback, please use the anonymous feedback function in the CMS or write me an email.

Good Morning,

We are going to offer an Office Hour today at 10am here as well as next Monday at 12noon under this link.

We are also going to revise some important topics for the exam in a preparatory tutorial on the 18 March at 2pm in zoom.
This just in advance, there is going to be another announcement for the preparatory tutorial.

Till then, Stay Healthy!

Given that the Covid situation does not seem to be getting that much better, I have decided to not expose you to (additional) risks by travelling to the university to take the exam as planned on February 9th. Instead, after discussing the examination office, I have decided to move the exam to April 1 (sorry, no April fool's joke here). This is to allow to have backup oral exams within the first two weeks of the new semester. Obviously, there will not be a written backup exam on April 9.

Please understand that I haven't taken this decision lightly, but I strongly disagree with the university's policy to go ahead with on-site exams as scheduled. Also, we will use the time until April 1 to prepare for the possibility of an open book exam, should the infection numbers still not be low enough to warrant on-site exams. In that case, you'd take that exam remotely (somehow..).

Given that the new variant of the Cysec study course is not yet in the LSF, we will use the CMS registration for the exam. Please be sure to be signed up for the exam until 2.2.2021 23:59 at the latest. If you are unsure about being admitted, don't worry: you can register nevertheless and if you don't get the admission, you'll be removed without negative consequences (like a failed attempt at the exam).

As you will need some python skills in the in the exercise sheets, we offer a Python Crash Course on November 11th at 14:15 in Zoom .

For any questions, feel free to use the Askbot, or visit one of our Office Hours on the following days: 
- Mon, 16.11 12:00 in Zoom,
- Mon, 23.11 12:00 in Zoom,
- Mon, 30.11 10:00 in Zoom

Please note the links are different ones.

Information about how to access recordings is now available through Information -> Access to lectures. Also, I have uploaded the slides including the answers to the quizzes to the CMS.

 

Finally, you can find our Mattermost installation at https://mattermost.cysec1.de. This should redirect you to the Gitlab and when you click login, to the CMS (there was an error earlier, but that is fixed now..).

Our lecture starts on Tuesday, November 3, at 10 am. Please see https://cms.cispa.saarland/cysec1_2021/2/Access_to_lectures for the details on how to access it. The lecture will be recorded and slides will be available before the lecture. It is nevertheless highly recommended to attend the live lectures.

"See" you on Tuesday

Hi all,

given the special Corona situation, the lecture will be fully virtualized and run online. For tutorials, though, would like to hear your opinion. The tutorials are a combination of office hours (where you can ask tutors clarification questions) and exercises that you work on in the group. This can either be offline (in-person) in one of the big lecture halls with significant distance between each other (approx. 2m) or fully virtualized as well. To get an estimate on how many types of tutorial we should offer, I appreciate your input in the following Doodle.

https://doodle.com/poll/4brsa7e8nnk2d5zc

You can vote "Yes" (implying you want to have them online only), "If-need-be" (you don't care) or "No" (offline only).

I apologize for the weird way of welcoming you to the lecture, but we require your input here.