COMP 4632: Practicing Cybersecurity (Spring 2025) 


Lecture Details

Instructor: Dongdong She (dongdong@cse.ust.hk)
Office hours: Monday (1:30-2:00 pm) CYT 3006
TA: Qiao Zhang (qzhangdi@connect.ust.hk)
Classroom: Rm 4213, Lift 19
Class hours: Wednesday (9:00 am - 12:00 pm)

Course Description

This course equips students with cybersecurity knowledge and current IT practices on security risk management. The course covers current security trends, industrial practices on IT security, design requirements for secure web and mobile applications, security assessment, risk analysis and risk management.

Course Goal

Through hands-on laboratory sessions, students will understand existing IT security issues, learn how to assess IT security risks, and conduct experiments on ethical hacking. They will practice system attack and defense strategies using security tools, so as to gain practical experience to become a cybersecurity professional.

Prerequisite

Knowledge in web programming and database administration is not essential but a plus. Prerequisite(s): COMP 2012 OR COMP 2012H; Corequisite(s): COMP 3511  

Grading 


Schedule

Date

Topics

Lecture slides & Lab

05/02 

Introduction  

slides, Lock picking competition

12/02 

Basic Concept on IT Security and setup of Virtualization Environment 

Lecture slides: Briefing on CyberSecurity practices, Threats and Vulnerabilities
Lab: Setup of ESXi server and walkthrough of vSphere client and VM environment. Setup of Kali Linux and Windows 10 Victim Guest OS.

19/02 

IAM, Authentication and Authorization 

Lecture slides: Authentication, Authorization, Password Scheme, Federated Authentication
Lab: Perform password cracking, password dumping,write your own password cracker.

26/02 

OS Security and Virtualization 

Lecture slides: Network basis, Network architecture and security architecture, Virtualization, Virtualization security
Lab: Setup Linux and Wireshark lab environment, virtual network. Perform WiFi analysis, WiFi exploits, and WiFi cracking

05/03 

Network Basics 

Lecture slides: DNS, LAN and WAN, Directory services and Database security, PKI, SSL/TLS, Secure Protocol, Heartbleed and POODLE
Lab: Setup Web and FTP services, DNS services, database services.

12/03 

Network Security 

Lecture slides: Network attack, scanning, sniffing, vulnerability scanning, Denial of Service attacks, email security, phishing
Lab: Perform network scanning (nmap), vulnerability scanning (nessus), email spoofing attack.

19/03 

Web Application Programming 

Lecture slides: Web Protocol, PHP, JavaScript, SQL query, and web authentication
Lab: Develop and deploy a website through the use of CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. Connect PHP website to the database and then set up an authentication component to the website

26/03 

Web Application Hacking 

Lecture slides: OWASP Top 3/10 attack methods including SQL injection, XSS, CSRF
Lab: Perform web attacks using different kinds of web attack methods: web session management attack, injection attack, Cross-site scripting, and CSRF attack

09/04 

Operating System Security 

Lecture slides: System and Kernel Attack, Patch Management, Trusted System Security
Lab: Perform system exploitation using Metasploit, existing exploit scripts, and payloads

16/04 

Application Security 

Lecture slides: Application security threats, Secure programming life cycle, Buffer Overflow, Application firewall, secure code review and security assessment concept, malware and virus
Lab: Perform software exploitation, understand and use various debug tools such as gdb and compose buffer overflow code

23/04 

Secure Infrastructure Design 

Lecture slides: Network defense mechanism, Firewall, IDS, Anti-DDoS, Honeypot
Lab: Set up Firewall, VPN, and Snort IDS

30/04 

Incident Response and Computer Forensics 

Lecture: Incident Response, Computer Crime, Forensics Investigation, and Compliance
Lab: Set up big data platform environment (ElasticSearch) for performing log analysis and attack tracing

07/05 

Advanced Topics on Security 

Lecture: No specific description provided
Lab: Project presentation