Dear All,

    As I mentioned before, my teaching load is unusually high this fall.
I can therefore only offer a limited amount of time to the reading course
this fall.

    Usually, my "netreads" class involved meetings almost every week, with
live demonstrations of packet crafting tools and passing exercises at the
end (see http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/passing-S14.txt,
          http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/passing-F15.txt,
          http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/passing-w16.txt).

    This term, I will not be able to offer "netreads" in its usual form; I
can only do a limited form of it. You will need to decide if this limited
form, described below, is right for you, and if you still want to take it.

    This term the course will also end with passing exercises, but I cannot
offer live tool demonstrations. Thus you will need to read assigned
materials, but you will need to practice with the tools on your own.
I will assign and post byweekly readings, and will be open to questions,
but I cannot guarantee quick replies or timely assistance with technical
problems; you will need to act a support group for each other.

    You will need either a Linux laptop or a MacOS laptop with a Linux
virtual machine. On that Linux system (actual or VM), you will need to
disable the Network Manager service, as it will interfere with advanced
manual network configurations that you will need for this course. You
will need complete control of the Linux system, which means that you
must have full root privileges on your machine and disable SELinux.
You will also need to be able to compile kernel drivers (not the kernel
itself) and load them into the kernel.

    Moreover, you will need an Ethernet interface on your machine and
be able to bridge it to your VM. Many laptops these days come with only
built-in Wi-Fi, not Ethernet; however, bridging Wi-Fi to a VM may not
work for you, and you may not be able to craft arbitary packets with your
Wi-Fi interface (this requires driver support, and many Wi-Fi network
chipsets do not support this functionality).

    I use the Debian distribution myself, but Kali Linux may work as well.

    Your first task will be to build such a machine, and test it
for sending link-layer packets from it with Scapy
(http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/). In particular, you should
be able to send Ethernet packets with a different source MAC address
than that of your interface with Scapy's sendp() function. You will
need to verify this using another machine connected to yours with
an Ethernet cable, and see with tcpdump or Wireshark on the other
machine that these packets are received.

    You may encounter technical problems while setting up your machine.
stackoverflow.com is a good resource to check in that case.

    I also suggest that you start reading about the basics of IPv4 and
IPv6. For IPv4, I recommend "Network Intrusion Detection" by
Stephen Northcutt and Judy Novak (any edition; used copies are available
for sale through Amazon and elsewhere). For IPv6, I recommend the free
book  https://sites.google.com/site/yartikhiy/home/ipv6book .

    Thank you,

--Sergey