Program Overview

Program Overview

The program COMP4617: Empirical Security Analysis and Engineering is designed to provide students with the skills to assess and improve the security of deployed systems. It focuses on data-driven approaches to collect operational data about a system's security and explores deployment issues at local and global scale.

Unit Details and Rules

Managing Faculty or University School

The managing faculty for this program is the Faculty of Engineering.

Details

• Study level: Undergraduate
• Academic unit: Computer Science
• Credit points: 6

Enrolment Rules

• Prerequisites: (DATA3888 or COMP3888 or COMP3988 or CSEC3888 or ISYS3888 or SOFT3888 or ENGG3112 or SCPU3001) and (CSEC3616 or INFO3616 or ELEC5616)
• Corequisites: None
• Prohibitions: COMP5617 or OCMP5617
• Assumed knowledge: A major in a computer science area

Learning Outcomes

At the completion of this unit, students should be able to:

• LO1. Understand the balance between risk, achieved security, and cost; experience with threat modelling and risk analysis as tools to choose this balance for a given system
• LO2. Understand common security terminology in security literature
• LO3. Understand different ways in which security of computer systems can be compromised, e.g. physically, remotely, operationally (esp. social engineering); and relate specific attack scenarios to the major security goals such as authentication, integrity, secrecy, non-repudiation
• LO4. Understand the major challenges for security of programs, information, computers and networks, and ability to avoid most egregious (typical) flaws in designing and operating IT systems
• LO5. Demonstrate a high-level knowledge of common approaches to achieve security goals in computer systems, including the main security protocols in the Internet stack
• LO6. Demonstrate knowledge of privacy-preserving technologies
• LO7. Produce written reports that evaluate a system's security
• LO8. Research information on security issues from the literature, and analyse a security incident use case

Unit Availability

This unit is available in the following sessions and locations:

• Semester 2 2026: Normal evening, Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney
• Semester 2 2023: Normal evening, Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney
• Semester 2 2024: Normal evening, Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney