COMPUTER NETWORKS AND SECURITY (6 SCU)

Learning Outcomes:

Upon successful completion of this course, students are expected to be able to identify network equipment, and describe their function and parameters; calculate network parameters to achieve a given requirement; identify and apply appropriate network components to solve a given design; implement a small network with the correct configuration; develop solutions for networking and security problems, balancing business concerns, technical issues and security; identify infrastructure components and the roles they serve; design infrastructure including devices, topologies, protocols, systems software, management and security; and analyze the performance of enterprise network systems.

Topics:

The course is designed to understand computer security through experiments. It shows the educational benefits from computer break-ins through capturing the ever-changing penetration lines of attacks such as botnets, worms, and malware. Students install a computer system on a network and observe what happens to it, learn which vulnerabilities adversaries are using. The observed methods of operations by these intruders might even be some of which we are unaware of. If the system serves no other purpose, then every attempt to contact it seems suspect. If the system is attacked, the students learn methods of identifying the actors and evaluate their actions that can be of novel techniques. These are further analyzed to exhibit the impact of the incident on the victim organization.

Pre-requisite(s): None