Announcements

Hi class,

Assignment 4 is released and available at this page. The due date is August 11th end of day.

Good luck with the assignment!

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

The perception survey for this course is now ready and running. The participation window is from Thursday, July 20 to Wednesday, August 2.

Your feedback is very important to us since it gives us very important information about what you think of different components of this course. Excellence in undergraduate education is of vital importance at the University of Waterloo in general and the Faculty of Mathematics in particular. These surveys are anonymous and will not be viewed until after the course has been completed.

Following are some useful tips for writing effective feedback:

• Be honest: share your learning experience
• Be focused: restrict comments to your experience
• Be constructive: offer suggestions
• Be specific: provide examples

In general, use language that support your instructor’s wellbeing :)

This term you will notice additional questions which are being pilot tested in Math. We appreciate the extra time and effort it will take to complete these questions. The responses to the pilot questions, along with future focus groups will be analyzed to determine which questions will be meaningful to retain in the future.

We appreciate the time you spend on completing the course perception survey and thank you in advance for the constructive feedback!

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

Assignment 3 is released and available at this page. The due date is July 28th end of day.

Good luck with the assignment!

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

As per request from the authors of the slides, we are now moving the slides for the Mobile Security Module behind LEARN. You can find the slides under Course Content under the course website.

Slides for other modules can still be accessed through the course website.

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

Due to a travel arrangement, I won’t be able to deliver in-person lectures on July 13, 18, and 20 (three lectures in total). Instead, I’ll release recorded lectures on LEARN on July 12.

The three lectures will cover the entire module on Non-technical Aspects in Security, including ethics, administrative security, and a brief introduction to blockchain. None of the topics covered will be examined in assignments However, this doesn’t make them any less important, especially the awareness of ethical and legal issues.

For students who have taken CS458 or are currently taking CS458, you can skip at least the first two lectures as they overlap with the last module of CS458. Other students are highly encouraged to watch the recordings and get familiar with these topics.

Sincerely, I apologize for being unable to deliver the lectures in-person. I’ll keep an eye on Piazza from time to time so if you have any questions regarding any of the lectures, please do not hesitate to make a post on Piazza and I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

I’ll see you all on July 25 for the last week of lecture for this course.

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

Due to both the overwhelming number of questions on Piazza and the technical difficulties in setting-up the VM, we have decided to postpone the deadline of A2 by one week.

The new deadline for Assignment 2 is now July 07th, end of day (Waterloo time). TA will host an extra office hour on July 5th Wednesday at 10am at DC 3333.

Correspondingly, we will postpone the release of Assignment 3 by a week now (and a hopefully simpler Assignment 3).

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

As promised, we are opening an evaluation server for Assignment 2 Part 1. This is also going to be the environment we will use to grade all submissions for Assignment 2 Part 1.

The evaluation server is hosted on an ugster machine and can be accessed via http://ugster71d.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca:8000/. You can find detailed instructions on the landing page. You might need to use the campus VPN if you can’t access it from outside.

In short,

• to submit a package to the server, ZIP the package directory, send a HTTP POST request to http://ugster71d.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca:8000/submit with the ZIP content as body. You will get a hash string as the package identifier.

• to check the analysis result (after the server has processed the package), send a HTTP GET request to http://ugster71d.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca:8000/status/<hash> where the <hash> is the hash value you get from the package submission phase.

As a reference, here is the analysis result of the sample package that is distributed in the VM and docker image.

Some important things to note regarding the submission system:

• Submitting to the evaluation platform DOES NOT count towards assignment submission. To make the final submission, please follow the instructions in the Assignment instruction file and make the final submission on LEARN. We DO NOT accept package hashes as proof-of-submission.
• This evaluation server is NOT well tested, meaning, there might be bugs. If you observe weird behaviors, please make a Piazza post and we will try to investigate as soon as possible.
• Please DO NOT rely on the submission server for iteration. The server is NOT designed to be a system for quick feedback. For each package, the server tries to analyze it to the fullest extent (i.e., 3 analyzers x 15 minutes each). A better strategy is to develop the package using a local platform and only use the server for final confirmation.

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

For those who runs into difficulties setting-up the virtual machine for Assignment 2 Part 1 (including issues due to Apple Silicon chips) we have now a Docker-based alternative on this GitHub repository. Please follow the README.md file for initial setup and after that, you should be able to use the run-*.sh helper script to invoke individual tools.

NOTE: this is still an experimental solution so for those who run into issues using the Docker-based solution, please make a post on Piazza and we will try to fix it as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

Assignment 2 is released and available at this page. The due date is June 30th end of day.

Good luck with the assignment!

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

Assignment 1 is released and available at this page. The due date is June 9th end of day.

Good luck with the assignment!

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

As you might have noticed on the course calendar, we will NOT have a lecture on Tuesday May 23 as this day is designated as a backup date for Monday classes affected by Victoria Day (and plus I need to attend a conference so I am out of town anyway…). The Thursday lecture is still on as scheduled.

Best Regards,
Meng

Hi class,

The code and demo (video clip) for the buffer overflow exploit is uploaded on LEARN for your reference. As these are not public information, please do not distribute them outside this course.

Best Regards,
Meng

Welcome to CS 489/698 in the S23 term!