Instructor: Ivan Strnad, Science Hall, Rm 137, phone: 575-646-6831
    E-mail: Use my CS (istrnad@cs.nmsu.edu) or NMSU (ivstrnad@nmsu.edu) e-mails only.
    Office Hours: Tuesday 10:00-11:00 a.m., and any time if the door is open and you see me in my office (or by appointment)

Teaching Assistant: Strahinja Trecakov, Science Hall, Rm SH 126
    E-mail: trecakov@nmsu.edu
    Office Hours: Monday 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday noon - 2:30 p.m.

Prerequisites: At least a C in CS 273 or consent of instructor
Course Web Site:
    http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~istrnad/cs478 and Canvas at http://learn.nmsu.edu

Required Textbook:

Mark Stamp Information Security: Principles and Practice, 2nd Edition Wiley 2011, ISBN: 978-0-470-62639-9

CS 478 is an introductory course in Computer Security. The aim of this course is to introduce fundamental concepts in security and privacy and how they apply to computers and our interaction with them. The emphasis of the course will be on understanding requirements of security in different contexts, the aspects of security/privacy that a computer engineer/programmer needs to account for while designing software and protocols and the engineering trade-offs involved in the said design. By the time the student is done with the course, he/she will have a broad idea in the area of security and privacy including the concepts, the requirements, and the practical implementation challenges. To improve understanding of the concepts, two to three multi-week projects including design and implementation will be assigned. The goal is for the students to learn about computer security, infer the requirements of a secure system, and be prepared to design secure systems and protocols in the future.

• Understand the need for security and privacy in systems and protocol design.
• Ability to understand the important building blocks of security:
  1. hashing,
  2. message authentication codes,
  3. symmetric encryption,
  4. asymmetric encryption,
  5. symmetric key infrastructure,
  6. public key infrastructure, and
  7. certificates.
• Critically analyze and understand the building blocks; and
• Possess the ability to utilize the building blocks in designing secure systems and secure and privacy-preserving protocols.