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Unit of study_
COMP8617: Empirical Security Analysis and Engineering
2025 unit information
This unit will present the lessons from recent research and from case studies of practice to bring students the skills to assess and improve the security of deployed systems. A particular focus is on data-driven approaches to collect operational data about a system's security. We explore deployment issues at local and global scale, e.g. for X.509, DNS, and BGP, and also take human factors explicitly into account. As a result, students will learn to put building blocks of security together in a sound way, to arrive at engineering solutions that are empirically verifiable, functional, and secure against realistic threats. As Dan Geer once famously said: "Any security technology whose effectiveness can't be empirically determined is indistinguishable from blind luck."
Unit details and rules
Managing faculty or University school:
Engineering
| Study level | Postgraduate |
|---|---|
| Academic unit | Computer Science |
| Credit points | 6 |
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Prerequisites:
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None |
|---|---|
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Corequisites:
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None |
| Prohibitions:
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COMP5617 or COMP4617 |
| Assumed knowledge:
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INFO3616 or ELEC5616 |
At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:
- LO1. Understand the balance between risk, achieved security, and cost; experience with threat modelling and risk analysis as tools to choose this balance for a given system
- LO2. Understand common security terminology in security literature
- LO3. Understand different ways in which security of computer systems can be compromised, e.g. physically, remotely, operationally (esp. social engineering); and relate specific attack scenarios to the major security goals such as authentication, integrity, secrecy, non-repudiation
- LO4. Understand the major challenges for security of programs, information, computers and networks, and ability to avoid most egregious (typical) flaws in designing and operating IT systems
- LO5. Demonstrate a high-level knowledge of common approaches to achieve security goals in computer systems.
- LO6. Produce written reports that evaluate a system's security
- LO7. Research information on security issues from the literature, and analyse a security incident use case
Unit availability
This section lists the session, attendance modes and locations the unit is available in. There is a unit outline for each of the unit availabilities, which gives you information about the unit including assessment details and a schedule of weekly activities.
The outline is published 2 weeks before the first day of teaching. You can look at previous outlines for a guide to the details of a unit.
| Session | MoA ? | Location | Outline ? |
|---|---|---|---|
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Semester 2 2024
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Normal evening | Camperdown/Darlington, Sydney |
Outline unavailable
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| Session | MoA ? | Location | Outline ? |
|---|---|---|---|
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Semester 2 2025
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Normal evening | Camperdown/Darlington, Sydney |
Outline unavailable
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Modes of attendance (MoA)
This refers to the Mode of attendance (MoA) for the unit as it appears when you’re selecting your units in Sydney Student. Find more information about modes of attendance on our website.
