Program Overview

Beaver Works Summer Institute will help students learn and understand cyber security. Software   is   pervasive   and   everyday   reliance   on   software-intensive   systems   by individuals,  businesses,  industries,  and  governments  is  only  increasing.  The  many benefits of using software, however, come at a price: the cyber threats are real, and their impacts can be devastating. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of cybersecurity  and  then   go  over  real-world  cybersecurity  threats  and  students  will  be challenged to develop ways to mitigate them.

Online Course

The online component for the Cybersecurity of Software Intensive Systems course runs from January to May and is open to all interested students. It contains important introductory material to provide students with the background required to successfully complete the four-week summer course. The following modules will be covered.

• The Bascis of Cybersecurity
• Programming in Python
• Programming in C
• Assembly
• Basics of Computer Networking
• Basics of Cryptography
• Introduction to Usable Security

Summer Course

The four-week summer program runs from beginning to end of July for a select group of  students, and it is focused on a study of a distributed system providing a service to common users like you. The course will consist of a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises that reinforce and apply the material. Teams of BWSI students will design and implement their own aspects of this system to address typical cybersecurity threats that services encounter in real life. Each team will be given an opportunity to assess other teams’ designs. The following is the outline for the summer course:

Course Outline

Week 1: Distributed Systems

•   Distributed system fundamentals
•   Dependability
•   Design challenge introduction

Week 2: Cybersecurity Fundamentals
•   Network security
•   Applied cryptography

Week 3: Vulnerability Assessment
•   Bug classes
•   Fuzzing
•   Reverse engineering

Week 4: Human Aspects of Cybersecurity
•   Social engineering and usable security
•   Finalize design and assessments