IT Modal - Cybersecurity — the Hacker eXperience

As anybody, familiar with 1970s sitcoms can confirm, Mel, Alice's cook used to say:

“the best defense is a good offense”.

In cybersecurity, a similar saying would be that in order to know how to secure something, one needs first to know how to compromise & break it.

This is exactly what the MODAL offers: to help you understand — and try — how to “break things”. This can include topics such as:

• TCP Connection hijacking & SYN flooding
• SQL Injection attacks on WWW servers
• Heartbleed - that SSL bug that caused the whole Internet to flip out
• DNS Cache Poisoning
• ...

This course consists of a set of instructional videos, some quizzes, tutorials, a set of challenges -- and regular exchanges with your professors and instructors over WebEx.

• Tutorials serve to help students to acquire a certain set of skills. Each tutorial requires a submission of some code, which will be evaluated, and a grade for each tutorial will be given.

• Quizzes serve to allow checking that certain theoretical concepts have been acquired. Each quiz can be attempted once. Completing a quiz will give a number of points and will unblock future course activities (tutorials, videos, challenges, and more quizzes...)

• Challenges each represent "a thing to hack", such as DNS, or TCP, or DHCP, or invoking a buffer overflow, or performing a man-in-the-middle attack. Challenges will each have an explanation, and supporting material, for what is expected - but will require independent thinking. Each challenge requires a demonstration to an instructor, then submission of some code, which will be scrutinised. Based on all this, a grade will be awarded.

  • Each challenge can bring you a maximum number of points, which will be indicated for the challenge.

  • A submission which "does the job, nothing more, nothing less" will be given 50% of the maximum number of points, indicated for the challenge

  • To get maximum points, an additional effort, such as highly modular code, flexible, robust, or supporting different attack approaches, is required.

You're encouraged to work in a small group of 1-2 students for each challenge.

You will choose to work on challenges in the order you like, and you will do however many you want - or, need, in order to get enough points to pass the course.

GradingL

• >50 points are required to "pass" the course, and get the letter-grade C
• All students scoring >50 will thus be given A/B/C grades, in accordance with the "note de cadrage" from the Direction d'Études.
• Any instance of plagiarism will be met with an F.
• The grade F, will be used for all scores <50 points.

Remedial Exam:

Students who do not validate (i.e., who do not get a grade of C or above) in the ordinary session will have to do additional challenges - to be defined by the professor. These must be demonstrated and validated as for the challenges during the course.

Language:

• All course materials are in English
• All instructors speak English and French (and often also Danish and Spanish)

Prerequisites:

• Basic familiarity with computer programming, in any language (python, PHP, Java, C, ...)

See the English version of the general description.

See the English version of the general description.

Video capsules, Asynchronous Learning Flows, Flipped Classrooms