Operating System Security

This survey of operating system security compares approaches to security taken among several modern operating systems. The course will teach how to conceptualize design issues, principles, and good practices in securing systems in today’s increasingly diverse and complex computing ecosystem, which extends from things and personal devices to enterprises, with processing increasingly in the cloud. We will approach operating systems individually and then build on them so that students learn techniques for establishing trust across a set of interoperating systems.

Student Learning Outcomes

1. Appraise installed systems for their security, confidentiality, and integrity characteristics
2. Diagnose and recover from typical security problems on a variety of operating systems (e.g., malware, rootkits)
3. Solve problems typically presented to security practitioners in regular work practices
4. Examine and verify system configurations for their adherence to security policies
5. Modify systems to enhance security and auditability by reconfiguring and adding open source components
6. Compare operating system alternatives and free software enhancements based on business needs and the corresponding security properties
7. Perform a root-cause analysis of security failure
8. Search effectively for many kinds of security-related information on the Internet