Assignment 3: Report and Marking Scheme

Report

For your report, you are to produce a single pdf, with 2.5cm margins, two columns, and 10pt font (Times New Roman). Aim for half a page of content. Max one page. This should include your and your partners' names and student numbers. Add the pdf, named report3.pdf, into your "a3" repository, and commit the file. Be sure to cite any sources you use.

I recommend LaTeX for producing your documents; you may, however, use Word or OpenOffice and convert the file to pdf. A single bonus mark will be given to students who use LaTeX to produce their reports. If you do so, hand in the .tex file along with the .pdf file to demonstrate to the marker that you used LaTeX. I have provided a LaTeX template for you to use (output).

There are three sections to your report; please indicate them clearly.

  1. Section 1: Pick any famous computer virus other than Stuxnet (where "famous" is "notable enough to have its own Wikipeda article"). Read up on the virus.
    1. How does the virus work? What does it exploit? Give a high level description.
    2. What damage has this virus done?
    3. How can the virus be contained or prevented? (Can it?) Again, we want a high level description.
  2. Section 2: Why is so much malware written in C/C++?
    1. What makes C so vulnerable to security exploits?
    2. What do other languages, like Java and Python, do to improve security?
    3. What can you do to make C code more secure?
  3. Section 3: Comic book villains/antiheros like Dr. Horrible aside, computer security is a huge problem facing modern society.
    1. Watch the following TED Talk: Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon -- summarize what you learnt in a few sentences.
    2. Watch the following TED Talk: All Your Devices can be Hacked -- summarize what you learnt in a few sentences.
    3. Reflect on these two talks. What do they mean for your future as an engineer? When you become a professional engineer, how will computer security issues affect you?

Marking Scheme