M.S. Cybersecurity and Privacy

Degree Overview

Describe cybersecurity and privacy mechanisms, standards and state-of-the-art capabilities.
Describe potential cyber attacks and the actors that might perform them, and apply cyber defense methods to prepare a system to repel attacks.
Perform security review of applications, systems and infrastructure.
Design and implement system, network and infrastructure-level solutions to ensure the security and privacy of communications and data against specific security threats, while understanding the trade-offs between security, usability and performance.
Use standard security terminology to communicate effectively with other cybersecurity professionals.
Understand the ethical and legal implications of cyber attacks.

Cryptography and Security

Understand the difference between the symmetric key and public key cryptography approaches.
Select appropriate symmetric and public key cryptography protocols for a given application.

Develop an efficient implementation of a cryptographic protocol based on a Discrete Logarithm Problem, RSA (Factoring) Problem or Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem.

Security and Privacy in Computing

Understand the various models to evaluate the security of computer systems.
Interpret security guarantees and assess the level of security provided by a cryptographic protocol.
Understand the various security goals for communication over an insecure network.
Identify the appropriate types of cryptographic primitives that should be used to achieve each of these goals.
Understand the advantages and limitations of using symmetric key versus public-key cryptography.

Network Protocols Security

Identify the appropriate security primitives that should be used to achieve specific security goals for communication over insecure networks.
Analyze the security of the main mechanisms used on the internet to secure communication between computer systems at various network layers, including physical, network, transport and application layers.
Describe common attacks against wired and wireless network protocols using standard terminology, allowing them to communicate effectively with other security professionals.