COMP-4721 Details
COMP 4721 Computer Security
Course description
This course provides an introduction and overview of computer security. This course gives you an overview of the essential components of computer security along with basic cryptography and some concepts from network security. Specific topics include:
- Assets, risks and vulnerabilities
- The CIA triad
- Cryptography basics (asymmetric vs. symmetric, block vs. stream, etc.), old-school cryptosystems (substitution, rotation, transposition)
- Cryptanalysis (frequency analysis, brute force, general weaknesses)
- Cryptography details (RSA, DSA, DH, EC)
- Security policies, access controls and protection methods
- Role-based access controls
- Database security
- Authentication technologies
- Host-based and network-based security issues and defensive technology and techniques
- Software vulnerability exploitation and prevention (buffer over/underflows, untrusted input, numerical errors, ROP chains, etc.)
- Threat modeling and attack surface
Course learning objectives
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- Assess risks, threats and vulnerabilities
- Develop a threat model
- Write a proposal to fortify a network against a given threat model
- Understand the details of a given intrusion
- Identify general principles that underlie different intrusions
- Develop vocabulary common to information security
- Understand the mathematical foundations on which modern cryptography is built
- Use off-the-shelf software for encryption/decryption and key management
- Write code that utilizes crypto libraries for encryption/decryption/signing