Computer Systems Security 6.566 / Spring 2024

It's a fun class; worth keeping in mind that several topics with 1-2 units here are whole specializations in the field, including:

* memory safety and exploitation (the "buffer overflow" section is about 20 years out of date, though super appropriate for a first course)

* the WebPKI/certificates thing

* messaging security and messaging cryptosystems,

* microarchitectural security and hardware side channels.

Multiple full courses on each of these subjects would bring you up to "practitioner" levels of expertise.

What they don't tell you. Everyone in the company will hate you, no one will fix the bugs you find, HR will want to sack you for fun, and the execs are all psycho's. Find a better career, like watching paint dry, or become a monk. Its fun, but not worth it. People are twats.

Seeing this makes me miss the salad days of MOOCs. I learned programming in the 2010s through MIT’s EDX Introduction to Programming course, and then a course on Coursera by Martin Odersky on Functional Programming through EPFL, and I feel like that ladder has been kicked away due to MOOC monetization policies. I wonder if we could return to these days.

I like that the MIT CSAIL CSS website (https://css.csail.mit.edu/) has a link to a Russian online gambling site due to what I’m assuming is a typo (click on the Foundations of Cryptography class)