City College will be adding several new cybersecurity courses to the curriculum for the 2024-2025 academic year as the program continues to expand. The new courses are: Applied Cryptography, Cryptography & Secure Communications, The Cyber Attack Lifecycle: Threat Intelligence, Digital Forensics, & Incident Response, and Research Topics in Cybersecurity. Course descriptions are below.
Applied Cryptography
An introduction to applied cryptography. The student will develop the ability to reason about cryptography in a variety of practical contexts and will learn best practices for mitigating threats and implementing cryptographic primitives. Topics will include cryptographic primitives, protocols constructed from these primitives, hardware vulnerabilities and their impacts, and advanced topics in applied cryptography.
Cryptography & Secure Communications
This course covers the theory of cryptographic protocols and some of its applications. Emphasis will be placed on the methodology of provable security, whereby the security goals of a given communication and/or computational task are abstracted into an adversarial model amenable to mathematical treatment. No prior knowledge of cryptography is required. However, general ease with algorithms and elementary probability theory, and maturity with mathematical proofs will be assumed.
The Cyber Attack Lifecycle: Threat Intelligence, Digital Forensics, & Incident Response
The cyberattack lifecycle consists of the following phases: 1) Threat Intelligence 2) Digital Forensics 3) Incident Response.
This course provides a holistic overview of the cyber defense team tasks starting with monitoring and analyzing adversaries’ activities online, assigning risk scores and probabilities of occurrence, and implementing defense techniques. It will also include an introduction to the fundamental skills of digital forensics to detect and analyze network and host intrusions to identify the “Why, Who, How, What, and When” in order to respond during the incident and to secure the systems against future attacks.
Research Topics in Cybersecurity
A course in performing academic research in security and privacy. Students will get an opportunity to engage with published research through reading impactful research papers in the field and writing review-style paper summaries of their readings. Students will also present these papers to the class, and lead discussions about the papers’ merits. Concurrently with reading and evaluating research, groups of students will work on a novel security research project on a topic of their choosing. The course will culminate in a research symposium, with groups presenting their research findings to the class.