Information Security

This course will help students understand and model information security in the modern world. It will help students reason concretely about real-world problems through case studies. This course will not cover design of security systems, but will cover requirement analysis methods and threat modelling. It will also familiarise students with commonly used security tools and measures in everyday life.

Data Structures and Algorithms, Probability and Statistics

• Introduction to security
• Trust vs verifiability
• Adversarial threat models
• Notions of secrecy, privacy, and security
• Basics of cryptography – symmetric and public key encryption, authentication, hash functions, digital signatures, certificates, cryptographic protocols, and applications
• Cryptographic security definitions
• Models of authentication and authorisation; biometrics; identity
• Issues with verification of hardware and software integrity; the frameworks of formal verification and model checking
• Trust assumptions, distributing trust with secure multiparty computations, hardware trust models, trusted computing environments and remote attestation
• Elements of OS and Network security

1. Matthew A. Bishop, Computer Security: Art and Science, 2nd Edition, Pearson, 2018
2. Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, John Wiley & Sons, 1996
3. William Stallings, Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice, 8th Edition, Pearson, 2022
4. Ross Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, 3rd Edition, Wiley, 2020
5. Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner, Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, 3rd Edition, Pearson

• All students are expected to follow a high ethical standard.
• Collaborations and discussions are encouraged. However, all students are required to write up all solutions and submitted work entirely on their own. Any collaboration, or help taken, must be declared. All submissions must include a declaration of originality.
• Students are encouraged to refer to books, papers, internet resources and tools like ChatGPT. They may even consult other individuals. However, the source must be clearly cited if any part of the solution (or even an idea) is taken from such a source.
• Failure to declare any help taken will be interpreted as academic misconduct and result in a F grade in the course.

• Quizzes: 20%
• Assignments and project: 30%
• Midterm examination: 25%
• Final examination: 25%