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INFO3155

Course Title: 
Information Assurance and Security
Credits: 
3
Educational Level: 
III
Semester offered: 
II
Associated Programme: 
B.Sc. IT
Core Course: 
yes
Course Aims: 

This course explores the security issues that every IT professional must be aware of. The course will inform the student on the various attack surfaces and defensive approaches that must be considered during all phases of life of an organisation's information technology assets. The course will also provide an opportunity for students to gain hands-on experience with the tools needed to protect an organisation from the various forms of attack it can be subjected to.

Syllabus: 
  • The reality for the growing need of security in our day to day tasks.
  • Confidentiality, integrity and availability: the pillars of security.
  • The ethical issues facing the security professional.
  • Physical access to information resources: secure sites, security policies, backups, disaster recovery
  • The human factor: social engineering
  • Malware: viruses, worms, Trojan horses, mailers, etc.
  • Penetration testing: threat discovery, assessment and system hardening.
  • Confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation: the use of cryptography in security (hash functions, message digests, public/private key cryptography)
Course Assessment: 
  • Final exam (2 hours long)     60%
  • Coursework       40%
    • 2 assignments     25% (13%, 12%)
    • Programming projects   15%

Students will be required to pass both the coursework and the final examination to pass the course.

Course Prerequisites: 

COMP2190 - Net-Centric Computing AND INFO2100 - Mathematics and Statistics for IT or COMP2201 - Discrete Mathematics for Scientist.

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