I am offering an online cybersecurity elective to MSSE second-year students for 2022: SENG 5271. It uses my Cybersecurity in the Cloud specialization offered on Coursera, plus readings and labs from my textbook Elementary Information Security. The course and textbook focus on how technical measures relate to more abstract business and safety goals. We cover a lot about authentication, cryptography, and access controls. You may want to watch examples of the course videos posted online at Vimeo to see what I mean.

We focus on the practical engineering aspects, not the math. The math occasionally rears its ugly head, but it’s limited to grade school algebra and set theory, salted with simple concepts from probability.

I generally avoid doing lectures during class time, putting lectures online instead. Class time is spent in lab sessions: they last 60-90 minutes and are graded. This year they were graded pass-fail, though I can’t guarantee doing that with a larger class. If the class is too large for one lab session, I’ll split the class into two groups and spend half of the class time with each group. I enjoy hands-on (though remote) work with the individual students.

The online Coursera specialization consists of 16 modules divided into 4 courses. For the semester we complete 1 to 2 modules per week, usually only one. A typical module contains an hour of video lecture and demonstration, and one to three hours of assessments: quizzes and peer-reviewed research assignments. I encourage students to pick different topics for the peer-reviewed assignments to reduce the potential boredom of reviewing each other’s work. And, if you think it’s boring to read about cyberattacks, why would you take a cybersecurity course?

Day	Week	Course	Module	Topic	Lab
Saturday	1	1	1	Attack Surface, Svc Outline	Google drive access ctl
Friday	2	1	2	Net Security Architecture	crypto basics, nmap
Saturday	3	1	3	Net Crypto, CVSS	Public-key encryption
Friday	4	1	4	Cloud Arch, Virtualization	Server Certificates
Saturday	5	2	1	Databases, States	SOC 2-3, Breach Research
Friday	6	2	2	SQL, Data Breaches	Data Breach Review
Saturday	7	2	3	Vendor Data Services	Services Review
Friday	8	2	4	Data Privacy	DNS research
Saturday	9	3	1,2	App Arch & Authentication	Hash cracking, entropy
Friday	10	3	3	Sessions	Email tracing
Saturday	11			Spring Break	NO CLASS
Friday	12	3	4	Scripts	Script based attacks
Saturday	13	4	1	Top Ten, Risk #1	Injection Demos
Friday	14	4	2	Risks #2, 3, 4	Vulnerability scanning
Saturday	15			Graduation	NO CLASS
Saturday	16	4	3, 4	Risks #5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10	Discussion

Depending on pandemic restrictions and class interest, we might substitute one or more in-person labs at the University for those listed above.

Here are links to the four Coursera courses in the specialization:

1. Cloud Security Basics
2. Cloud Data Security
3. Cloud Application Security
4. Cloud Top Ten Risks

I also posted draft videos from the first course on Vimeo, if you want to view examples of online course videos.

During SENG 5271, students participate in a “private session” of each Coursera course. If you want to see all of the course materials, you need to register for the course. Use any “try for free” feature Coursera provides, or a membership if you have one. If you register in a public Coursera session and complete graded assessments, however, grades might not carry over to your SENG 5271 grade. Quiz grades might carry over, but the peer reviewed assignment grades will not.