Courses

The Professional Master’s Degree in Information and Cybersecurity program courses provide a broad breadth in information security foundations, plus flexibility for the student to tailor the program for individual preference.

Foundational Courses

The 10-course, 30-credit hour sequence begins with two foundational courses:

• CS 50010, Foundational Principles of Information Security, covers concepts and foundational principles relevant to information security, including data structures, algorithm design, and the basics of cryptography.
• CS 50011, Introduction to Systems for Information Security, covers principles, tools, and concepts in the area of computer systems relevant to information security.

The two foundational courses will be offered online in the summer session.

Core Courses

The two required core courses are:

• CS 52600, Information Security, presents the theory and practice of information security. It covers the definitions of security, types of attacks, threats, risks, vulnerabilities, controls, types of computer crime and criminals, and methods of defense. Topics include user authentication, identification, and authorization; software security, operating system security, database security, network security, web security, privacy, malware, and security administration; law and ethics.
• CS 55500, Cryptography, covers cryptography from a practical cyber-security perspective. It includes concepts and tools of modern cryptography, including 1-way hash functions, symmetric cryptography, public key cryptography, digital signatures, and the basic notions of cryptographic security. The course highlights and illustrates the use of these concepts in major application domains including secure communication, data integrity, authentication, identification, time-stamping, digital cash and cyber-currencies, anonymity, and simultaneity.

Focus Courses

Four courses are required from the additional course offerings:

• CS 52300, Social, Economic, and Legal Aspects of Security, centers on understanding the policies, laws, and ethics underlying and defining information security; assessing the threat, risk, and realities of cyber warfare; and the impact of human factors and behavior in designing secure systems.
• CS 52700, Software Security, focuses on software security fundamentals, secure coding guidelines and principles, and advanced software security concepts. Students will learn to assess and understand threats, learn how to design and implement secure software systems, and get hands-on experience with common security pitfalls.
• CS 52800, Network Security, focuses on the principles and foundations of building secure network systems and on security and privacy challenges in existing and emerging networks. The course compares and analyzes network architectures and network protocols from the physical layer to the access control, network, transport and application layer from an adversarial standpoint to understand how to build more secure protocols that can withstand attacks.
• CS 52900, Security Analytics, covers basic data mining and machine learning techniques that are relevant for security analytics, as well as how to apply these analytics techniques to solve security problems.
• CS 55600, Data Security and Privacy (offered as CS 59000-DSP), covers techniques and tools for protecting the security and privacy of data.

Professional Master's Degree students gain professional skills and competencies to build, evaluate and maintain secure systems through course lab assignments and projects. Lab assignments will utilize cutting edge security techniques and software, real-world examples, and require students to respond to simulated security challenges and learn to develop secure systems with appropriate defense mechanisms. In the majority of courses, students will select final projects whose scope provides a professional capstone experience.

Elective Courses

Students choose two 3-credit electives from a range of courses.

Students in the residential program may choose additional CS courses, or select courses offered by other departments on campus. Seminar courses are approved on a case-by-case basis. The list of residential elective courses currently includes:

• Regular CS graduate courses not corresponding to or having significant overlap with CS courses already taken.
• Non-CS courses in the list of approved courses for CS graduate students.
• Other courses judged to be relevant to a professional in the area of information security. A list is under development.

Students in the 100% online program may choose online elective courses from the list below. 

• CS 54100 - Database Systems
• CS 57300 - Data Mining
• CS 58000 - Algorithm Design, Analysis and Implementation
• CS 59000 - Individual Study

Additional courses are under development.