Security, Privacy, and Politics in the Computer Age

Tufts University
Experimental College
Spring 2007

Syllabus and Lectures

All notes are in HTML format. Topics subject to change.

Date Topic
Thursday, 1/18 Course Introduction
Tuesday, 1/23 Proprietary, Free, and Open Source Software (w./ Linux and Knoppix Tutorials)
Thursday, 1/25 Social Engineering
Tuesday, 1/30 Cryptography and Networking
Thursday, 2/1 Computer Security Terminologies and Fundamentals
Tuesday, 2/6 Malware As You Know It
Thursday, 2/8 Security Tools
Tuesday, 2/13 Privacy
Thursday, 2/15 Protect Yourself
Tuesday, 2/20 Databases and Data Security
Thursday, 2/22 NO CLASS
Tuesday, 2/27 Musings: From Recent Government Actions to Don't Get Caught Hacking
Thursday, 3/1 Complex Attacks: Buffer Overflow, Denial of Service (DoS), and Rootkits
Tuesday, 3/6 Copyrights, Intellectual Property, and Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Thursday, 3/8 Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Technologies
Tuesday, 3/13 Software Insecurity: Breaking Software and Reverse Engineering
Thursday, 3/15 EXPERT PANEL SESSION: Security and Privacy in Higher Education: Current and Future Challenges
Tuesday, 3/20 SPRING BREAK
Thursday, 3/22 SPRING BREAK
Tuesday, 3/27 Secure Software Development, Part 1
Thursday, 3/29 Secure Software Development, Part 2
Tuesday, 4/3 Wireless Technologies and Location-Based Privacy
Thursday, 4/5 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags
Tuesday, 4/10 More Politics
Thursday, 4/12 Electronic Voting
Tuesday, 4/17 Regulatory Compliance
Thursday, 4/19 DEBATE: Vulnerability Disclosure
Tuesday, 4/24 Digital Investigations and Forensics
Thursday, 4/26 Looking Ahead and Putting It All Together (LAST DAY OF CLASS)

mchow@cs.tufts.edu