Intro to Security
This course was my first foray into networking and network security. It offered a broad glimpse into the security space and wetted my appetite for more networking courses to come. The course touched on all of the following topics:
- Packing sniffing and analysis (PCAPs)
- Security tools including Kali Linux, Wireshark, Nmap, Netcap, Scapy, John the Ripper, and Burp Suite, and Ettercap
- Command line tools including whois, strings, arp, and grep
- DoS and DDoS
- Password cracking
- Hash functions
- Symmetric and asymmetric encryption
- Encoding (e.g., Base64)
- Honeypots
- CVE and CWE
- Web security including cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross-site request forgery (XSRF), and directory traversal
- Static and dynamic analysis
- Malware analysis
The majority of our assignments were labs that gave us hands on experience with security tools (Wireshark, etc.) and some were small programming assignments in Python including a scanner that detects passwords sent in the clear and various types of port scans. The course concluded with a Capture the Flag game that we completed in teams, and tested much of what we learned throughout the semester.
The course was taught by the absolutely wonderful Ming Chow and you can find his course description here.