Foundations of Cybersecurity 1

Hello there,

we are saarsec, a Capture-the-Flag Team composed of students and lecturers from Saarland University. On April 15 and 16. we will be giving a workshop to familiarize interested students with Capture-the-Flag competitions!
In CTF competitions you attack and defend against security vulnerabilities to achieve points and win the game. CTFs are a great way to actually play around with the practical details of mounting attacks and defenses you have learned about in your lectures. This practical experience is not only be beneficial for your studies but also comes 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, you will learn how to find these vulnerabilities, exploit them on a large scale, and fix them. You'll spend more than 50% of the time in each slot on actual challenges!

At the end, we will host a CTF where all workshop participants compete using their newly acquired skills.

FAQ:

Q: When and where?

A: April 15th and 16th, Building E1.9 (Cispa Main Building).

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

Dear all,

the team is still busy grading, but given my constraints in the next weeks, we have to schedule the exam inspection right away. This will be this Thursday (February 16) from 9 to 11 in 0.02 (CISPA's showroom). We will stop letting students in at 10:30 to ensure we can end on time at 11. Please mark your calendars accordingly. 

Once the exam grades have been entered, you'll receive an email with your points and grades. 

Dear all,

we received feedback from a number of students who really appreciated the Python challenges and from others who struggled a lot, in particular in light of other lectures like MfI1 and Prog1. Therefore, we have decided to alleviate some of the burden on everyone and not release any new challenges after today (we released the fifth and final set of challenges today). This means that the total number of points you can get for the Python tasks will be 50. In addition, there are 240 points available through the regular sheets. Therefore, you need to reach 145 points in total to be admitted to the exam, while ensuring you do not flunk more than two sheets (i.e., less than 25%). If you have done the Python tasks, this will help you towards that goal, if you have not yet done any of the challenges, you need to average about 60% of the points across all exercise sheets. To allow you to track your progress, we have added a separate "Exam Admission" category.

We hope this takes some of the pressure off and wish you a Merry Christmas (if you are celebrating) and a great start into 2023.

Dear all,

On behalf of my colleague Giancarlo Pellegrino, let me tell you that CISPA has set up a dedicated mailing list to announce open hiwi positions, topics for theses, talk announcements, and other student-related activities (e.g., taking parts in studies we run). The list is moderated by CISPA to ensure only meaningful content.

You can self-subscribe through https://lists.cispa.saarland/listinfo/teaching-announce 

Dear all,

since we have had a couple of cases already, let me clarify a couple of things about what makes a case of plagiarism.

1. Copying from previous years' sample solutions: we may reuse tasks from prior years and some of you may have either taken the course before or know others that have. You may also share the solutions with others through Discord et al. This is plagiarism, irrespective of whether you change a couple of words.
2. Using online resources: I'm happy if you use additional material beyond the lecture slides to understand a subject. If you, however, start copying sentences (or parts therefore), this is plagiarism, irrespective of whether you change a couple of words.
3. You have taken the lecture last year and just copy in your solutions without understanding? This is self-plagiarism and also forbidden.

Any student who was caught in conducting any such action before today has already received (at least) a warning through 0P on the sheets. Going forward, anyone with a previous warning and another attempt to plagiarize will be excluded from the exam. Similarly, 0P will be handed out to anyone trying this for the first time, with the second time also leading to exclusion from the exam.

I know the first semester is challenging and plagiarizing might seem like a solution to get the exam admission. However, if you have personal reasons (e.g., family emergencies) and are unable to finish a sheet, I will not hold this against you and be generous in enforcing the admission rules. If you try to cheat, though, you loose any good will from us. Or simply put: if you do only half the sheet, you still have chances to get half of the points. If you plagiarize, you'll get 0P on the entire sheet irrespective of whether you did parts by yourself.

Finally, I know the vast majority of students neither conducts such actions nor endorse them. We have these strict rules in place to ensure that everyone who does the exercises themselves is not unfairly treated given the cheats of others. Hence, if you read this far and are not affected, please disregard this message :-)

Thanks  

Unfortunately, I need to cancel tomorrow's lecture. I caught a pretty severe cold and my voice isn't back up to a point where I could do a 90-minute lecture. I have uploaded the video from last year, please use this is to prepare for the exercises. If you have questions or something is unclear, feel free to use the Mattermost to inquire.

Dear all,

there is an error in one of the tests of Challenge 3. In the # Test part 4 section of the code, it should be expected_keys = ((33, 17), (3, 11, 13)) instead of expected_keys = ((33, 17), (3, 11, 6)), or in other words, the expected d should be 13 and not 6. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Have a great weekend and see you on Monday!

Dear all,

we have decided to offer a weekly office hour in addition to the tutorials. Office hours will be held every Tuesday from 9-11am via Zoom. You can find the link to it in the Office Hour tab of the CMS.

Furthermore, here is the link to the survey about the second challenge: https://qfreeaccountssjc1.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0Vd1fsnE6rE2yxw

Dear all,

since the tutorials covering the topics required to solve the challenges are very close to the submission date, we have decided to extend the deadlines, giving you two weeks to solve the challenges. In other words, once a challenge is published, you have one week to play around and then at the end of the week ask questions about the challenge and familiarize yourself with the topics in the tutorial. After that, you have another week to solve it with the newly acquired knowledge. Note that the change only applies to the challenges, and not to the deadlines for the exercise sheets!

This means that the deadline for this week's challenge will be extended from 21/11/2022 to 28/11/2022 at 11:59. Additionally, this means that we will not make our GameServer available until shortly before the new deadline.

Thanks to everyone who provided constructive feedback, it really helps us improve our course!

Dear all,

the exercise sheets are graded and the results are visible for you in the CMS.

In addition, we would like to clarify that both the exercise and challenge sheets are part of the requirements for exam admission. You must achieve at least 50% of all possible points combined and not 50% of the exercise sheets and 50% of the challenge sheets. In contrast, the 25% rule applies only to the exercise sheets and not to the challenges.

Dear all,

we just assigned the tutorials. Please check in your "Personal Status" page to see your tutorial.

Since we will introduce you to Python in tomorrow's tutorial and want to do it very interactively, you will need to install all the necessary tools in advance.  For this purpose, we added a Getting started with Python section to the Information tab of the CMS. There you will find the most important links to download everything required.

For those of you attending a tutorial in the CISPA lecture hall, it means building E9.1 room 0.05.

Have a great day and see you tomorrow!

Dear all,

welcome to the 2022/2023 iteration of Foundations of Cybersecurity 1! Unfortunately, I will be unable to be present for next week's lecture slot - normally we'd just skip the first slot. However, for this year, we have a novelty through an introduction into Python in the first tutorials. So, to allow tutorials to happen in the first week, I therefore recorded a quick intro video to explain how our lecture will work. Please find the details of how to access the recordings through Access to Lectures and the corresponding slides (with bugfixes) in the Materials Section.

Please also make sure to provide "exclusion points" for the tutorial slots. This can be done on your personal status page. We will assign tutorials on Wednesday, October 26, to allow you to go to the correct tutorial on Friday, October 28, when the tutorials start.

After those, we will have a regular lecture on October 31 in Günter-Hötz Lecture Hall (GHH). 

Looking forward to meet you all in person!