What’s cooking at OST: spring 2013 edition
It’s been quite a while since we spoke on our background activity, so here’s what we’ve got brewing:
-Right now the highest priority is getting the videos for the Reverse Engineering Malware class released. This class and Intro RE were taught in March by Frank Poz after swapping some material from each that belonged in the other. So there will be new material updates soon. For the video from Frank teaching Intro RE, we will first watch it to find material covered that wasn’t covered in the one currently posted from Matt, and we will try to find a graceful way to incorporate that so students can just watch the minimum amount of video with little if any overlap. But we will also separately post Frank’s Intro RE class video in full incase anyone would like to really learn the material well by watching two different perspectives on the same material.
-We also have some new classes with videos making their way through the public release queue. The type of material covered in the Network Forensics class has been reworked and expanded into 3 days of material. One day dedicated to netflow analysis, and 2 days on pcap analysis.
-Speaking of new classes, they haven’t been taught yet, but there is a 2 day disk forensics class, and a 1 day Red Teaming class scheduled to be taught in the next month. Both classes are from instructors who have been working in their respective areas more than a decade. We intend to get those public released too.
-We don’t know if there will ever be videos for these classes, but a PhD in cryptography has started working toward releasing her 5 days worth of class materials. While some of the 2 day cryptography fundamentals material is covered in Dan Boneh’s coursera course, the 3 days of cryptanalysis material (including labs) will provide a different spin specific to breaking encryption.
-The instructors have also started watching the 3 days of Introduction to Vulnerability Assessment videos (while they’re on planes between engagements ;)) for editing. We don’t yet have ETA on when they will be done though. The 3-day Advanced Application Vulnerability Assessment class will be taught again in May, after which we will work to get that public released as well.
-The Intro x86 and Rootkits classes were taught in January and March and some class material updates will be posted soon. As an experiment the rootkits class was also taught as a winter term class at UMD in January. Because the students there couldn’t be assumed to have taken all the OST course prerequisites, that lead to the material being made somewhat more standalone and expanded. So some of that material will be merged into the main slide decks, and some will be provided standalone on the rootkits page as additional reading.
-Finally, a little unfortunate news is that while we thought Advanced x86 VT-x would be taught back in November, Dave tried to expand it to a 3 day class so people would have more time to absorb the material and do the labs. But consequently wasn’t able to find enough people to take it. So hopefully this coming fall we will be able to motivate a group of people to take most of the trusted computing classes, with things like Intro and Intermediate x86 updated for 64 bit applicability, and have it all culminate in the new TXT class that work has begun on.
Thats it for now, stay tuned to this RSS feed or @OpenSecTraining for news as the above materials are released. And as always, if you’ve got open source training material that you’d like to have us host or link to,
Friday, April 12, 2013