Provides students with a basic understanding of the fundamental concepts and vocabulary of cybersecurity, and equips students with principles for building and operating secure systems. Examines the current cybersecurity threat landscape, adversarial thinking, and the need for cybersecurity; the goals of cybersecurity; how risk management informs approaches to cybersecurity; and the general principles and best practices of cybersecurity. Explores the use of mechanisms, including technological tools, and the human factor (policies, education, and training) in cybersecurity. Describes the tradeoffs between usability and security.

Explores the role of cybersecurity in defining, preventing, detecting, and responding to cybercrime incidents. Emphasizes investigation of digital evidence while complying with legal requirements. Topics include legal compliance, digital investigations, creating forensic images, data carving, device memory extraction.

This course will first study ethics as it relates to cybersecurity by considering specific situations where ethical dilemmas arise as well as the techniques and frameworks used to attack and gain access to a system by exploiting vulnerabilities so that a client knows of potential weaknesses in their system, known as “ethical hacking”. Topics include ethics and cybercrime, cybersecurity and social responsibilities, ethical dilemmas in cybersecurity, impact of cybersecurity practices in society, penetration testing methodologies, vulnerability scanning, attack surface discovery, attack vectors attack frameworks, exploitation and post-exploitation techniques, and ethical usage of penetration testing.

Provides students with an understanding of the characteristics of secure programs and the ability to implement systems that are resistant to attacks and that fail gracefully. Emphasizes the importance of bounds checking, input validation, code review, and aggressive testing. Includes the basics of the technologies and services that enable cloud computing, and the secure integration of cloud computing into software systems.

Database administration includes the creation and management of user accounts with an understanding of roles and privileges; understanding backups and failover; and use of hashing, encryption, and integrity checks within a database. More broadly, database security involves knowledge of database vulnerabilities and techniques for prevention of successful attacks, including SQL injection. Coverage of security models for common non-relational databases is included. Database normalization, storage and retrieval algorithms.

Study of the theory of cryptography together with applied programming projects. Topics include: discrete probability spaces; Shannon's theory of information and perfect secrecy; classical cryptosystems and cryptanalysis; authentication and key exchange; public key cryptosystems; elementary number theory, primality checking, the RSA cryptosystem; and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Builds on a solid understanding of networked systems to encompass modern network configuration, mapping, monitoring, and defense with a security focus. Includes basics of secure network architecture (segmentation, firewalls, DMZs, proxy servers); secure protocols and virtual private networks (VPNs); intrusion detection and prevention; network policies and access control; security incident and event management (SIEM) systems.

Students work in an approved position to gain experience in solving real problems using cybersecurity, write a report, and present the results to the entire department. Students may receive salaried appointments with cooperating companies. Taken during senior year. Instructor consent is required to enroll in this course.

Students carry out a project under the supervision of a faculty member, write a report, and present the results to the entire department. Taken during senior year. Instructor consent is required to enroll in this course.