Computer and Network Security(engineering.purdue.edu) |
Computer and Network Security(engineering.purdue.edu) |
Looks like it's a broad and deep foundational course. I'd imagine really appreciating this theory priming, and then taking on more domain-specific courses.
Nice to have all of these materials available!
In my perspective what you listed are simply tools and vendor offerings of which reading the documentation or getting a vendor specific certification is the expected process. This course teaches the foundations on which the items you listed were built from. The reason you probably feel that its so dated is because security hasn't changed we just like to keep calling it different things. Classes like this tend to focus on the more permanent area of network protocols as most exploits just ride on top of existing standards which if you understand those you can understand the "latest" vulnerabilities, cloud infrastructure, IAM and so on.
Notably they go back to 2006 and have been lovingly updated. That tends to yield notes that are carefully checked and refined through countless lectures and practical sessions.
They integrate well into my own because I also get students doing exercises with simple Python and Perl (great to see it still being a workhorse for this sort of thing), along with copious command line examples, always hexdumping and diffing things to to check results etc. So I like his (her?) style.
In response to sibling comments.
@sunhester
> In my experience "higher education facilities" are a nightmare of social extremes that inhibit the growth of "cyber security". But I'm usually wrong.
You are not wrong. Absolutely YES. That's why I got out of university teaching and moved into private work. Maybe some forceful and well connected people can still teach at places like Purdue, Stanford, MIT, but generally, and especially in the UK, universities have become a suffocating bureaucratic hellhole in which teaching, learning and research is no longer possible. They bring in completely inappropriate corporate CISO's who do not understand the tradeoffs and culture of the academy. They do not listen and they do not care so long as everyone uses the lowest common denominator of feculent Microsoft insecure rubbish. I eventually grew tired of spending all my energy fighting people whose job is to labour against my principles, sabotage all my efforts [0], undermine my students [1], and ask me to teach some people that frankly just felt morally wrong and a threat to national security [2].
@waihtis
> Nothing about cloud, AD, limited discourse about vulnerabilities which dominate (at least) the enterprise security space.
This is really a separate layer that falls more under "security management", "operational security" and "security systems engineering" and so on. We normally do this after the foundation. The thing with "enterprise" level is that it's a quite fluid set of practices, regulations, compliance docs and products that come in and out of fashion.
Anyway, as for maintaining quality, theoretical depth, and hands-on practice I am pleased to see a few profs are still "getting away with it".
[0] https://techwrongs.org/o/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/should-i-be-wor...
> "Think of these lecture notes as a living textbook that strives to strike a..."
The OWASP top 10 is self described as an awareness document[1] it wouldn't be something you teach a college course on.
[1] https://owasp.org/Top10/A00_2021_How_to_use_the_OWASP_Top_10...
1. Maybe you aren't the intended audience for this.
2. They are lecture notes and homework which are typically distilled from a textbook or industry experience topic.
These are helpful items for someone teaching or speaking to these topics, you aren't supposed to directly learn from the notes. Its the equivalent of saying you could learn c++ from a power point presentation.