Course Contents

The course will introduce students into the current methods and practical tools applied for system testing in order to evaluate the system from the computer security viewpoint. It will review different application areas such as intrusion detection and monitoring systems, access control and biological authentication, increasing system and information survivability, network attacks and defense. The students will be required to undertake research on the topic assigned and to implement a small project.

The course will be run in a seminar format. The students will be working in teams. It will combine the instructor’s lectures and introduction into the topics with weekly presentations prepared by the students. Each team will meet once a week with the instructor to discuss the progress. Every member of the team has to give a presentation.

My idea is to give students some flexibility in doing their projects.

The course project for the undergraduate students might include testing, evaluation and reporting the results for some computer security products (e.g. firewalls) testing.

The course project for the graduate students might include either of the following:

                     incorporating of more advanced research based on the bibliography search, review, generalization and producing some recommendations

-                      testing, evaluation and comparison of a few similar security products with reporting their advantages and disadvantages and developing an improvement plan

-                      theoretical development including mathematical investigation and computer simulation