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Canadian University to Begin Training Hackers
torok writes "According to an article at The Edmonton Journal, The University of Calgary is going to start teaching select computer science students to write software viruses in a special new disconnected lab. Will Canada be accused of training the world's next generation of cyber-terrorists... or peacekeepers?"
Crackers, not hackers.
I understand this is a losing battle but lets not get it wrong on slashdot.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
For those of you blindly following that link and getting 404's or similar, here's both the corrected version (Berkeley is spelled w/ 3 e's) and in link form -
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html
oopse, error on my notecards... thanks!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
University isn't about training coders. That's what college is for.
A Computer Science program at any (Canadian) University worth its salt has maybe 3 or 4 programming courses, and the other 30+ are algorithms, databases, networks, algebra, AI, operating systems, distributed systems, parallel systems, real-time systems, security, automata, digital logic, data structures, software engineering, graphics, instruction set architectures, compilers, professional ethics...
Note that any and all of the above are (relatively) language-independent. A CS student should be able to pick up a new language in a matter of days/weeks - but CS is not about syntax memorization.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The instructor is Dr. John Aycock, and he's definitely one of the better instructors we have in CPSC. His focus is in compilers and OS's, and taught the 3rd-year OS class for I think the first time last Winter.
He definitely has a strong security focus in his courses, and has one of the highest standards I've encountered in a prof regarding testing ( after turning in our implementation of an md5 hash as a system call in OpenBSD, he asked the class if anyone had tried testing with 1 Gb input strings. Just an example).
There's another course with a similar bent - a 4th year SysAdmin course that's year-long and involves substantial network programming. I'm told that the instructors will take down the network during your examination, forcing you to fix things while still completing your test online. Past grads also like to hammer the servers the students setup.
Personally, I'm glad to see these courses - most of these problems are things I've no clue about or would even think about how to prevent. Exposure is a start.
-- "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" [Oscar Wilde]
At the time, U of C didn't teach C either. Students were expected to be able to learn "C" on their own by third year, since they'd already been exposed to three or four different programming languages from different spheres. Once you were in third year, you could, for the most part, do your projects in whatever language you wanted, as long as the TA knew the language. Most students did their projects in C.
As well, the first year courses almost always used languages that students were unlikely to have encountered ever before. This helped level the field between the people who were "xc3113nt C h4x0rz" and everyone else. Everyone started from first principles in functional programming.
By the time I'd hit third year, I'd had courses where the language of choice were Pascal and Modula/2 from the "Von Newman" sphere, ML from the functional sphere, and PDP-11 assembly (was being replaced with SPARC assembly at the time) from the low level sphere.)
By the time I'd graduated, I'd added courses that required languages based on category theory (Charity) and one based on primitive recursion (it only had zero(), succ() and recurse(x,y) functions and you had to define the whole rest of the language yourself based on those.) If I'd taken different courses, I would have been exposed to Lisp, Prolog, SQL, etc.
The theory behind all this was they wanted to teach you different ways to think about problems, not just how to pound in a solution in C. People who just wanted to learn to code in C, be able to say they were a "programmer" and go on to a career went to SAIT or DeVry.
Pick any academic program and you'll find people who think something is "missing" or can be "better." That's why they evolve over time. The main flaw I found with the U of C program (IMHO) was that the only course that really required you to deal with a large project (CPSC 510, full year, write a compiler from scratch) wasn't a mandatory course.
But I'm glad I got my degree from U of C. And I'm not crippled in my ability to work in C/C++ because I never took a half-year course in it.
[...] there are probably many schools in the US doing this [...]
There are also some schools out there that will let you propose a course, provided that:
- the subject is educational
- you find more than the minimum required number of students
- you find someone to teach the class
[...] I took an Information Warfare class [...]
Funny you mention that, so did I -- at the aforementioned school. Officially it was called "Computer Ethics", but we've learned a lot about breaking into computers as well. There was even this one guy there, whose name eludes me for security purposes, who looked to be in his 30s at the time and who claimed to have worked for the gov't and was getting his masters at the time, IIRC. At the end of the semester the class got divvied up into groups for a project/presentation, so I made sure I was in the same group as he was. I've learned of a few neat tricks that the gov't was able to do with their technology, though no specifics (for obvious, classified reasons), like being able to pick up EM radiation from a monitor cable and reconstruct the video -- from a few hundred feet away.
But getting back on-topic... if there's a will, there's a way. If students are interested in learning something the school doesn't offer, they should try rallying up support from both their peers as well as the professors to have courses offered.
Have EVDO, will travel.