Information Security is everywhere: as the world becomes more and more digitized, so it becomes more and more hackable. Cyber attacks, data breaches, and even cyber warfare are all very real – so it is infinitely important to understand how hackers think and act, and how you can fight back.
In the first part of the course, you will learn the basic terminology and concepts in the field of information security. You will explore different types of vulnerabilities through famous examples of design flaws, implementation bugs and social engineering.
You will then move on to discover the art of cryptography, from ancient times to the modern era, and learn about famous ciphers, how they can be cracked, and what can be done to thwart such attacks. Next, you will learn about an important aspect of cryptography that involves no secrets at all: hash functions. You will understand what they are, how they can be used, and how they can be attacked.
You will then combine everything you’ve learned and take a critical view of different authentication schemes: passwords, challenge-response systems and biometrics. Finally, you will learn about the most critical vulnerability of all times – Buffer Overflow.
In the second part of the course, you will turn your attention to the Internet: you’ll start by learning about the inherent vulnerabilities lurking in the multiple layers of the Internet’s protocol stack and then meet the first line of internet defenses. Next, you’ll take an in-depth look at the modern cryptographic concepts that are at the core of internet security and discover the mathematical miracle that makes them possible.
With all this in mind, you will take a deep survey of the world wide web; understand the various technologies behind websites, how web servers and web browsers interact, how they can be attacked, and how they should be defended. Finally, you will learn about viruses, worms and trojans: what they are, how they spread, hide and attack, and the arms-race between them and the anti-virus industry.
This course was produced at Tel Aviv University by TAU Innovation in Teaching and Learning center.
Course created with support from
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