Curriculum Overview
Curriculum Overview
The Cybersecurity Design and Implementation Certificate (CDIC) is a for-credit, graduate level program, delivered 100% online. Upon completion, students receive an official certificate from The Ohio State University Graduate School.
The CDIC curiculum consists of four courses and students must complete 12 credit hours to earn the certificate. Students may select their own pace in completing the certificate. Please note these courses include live synchronous class sessions
Certificate Learning Objectives
Students enrolled in the certificate program will learn both the fundamental engineering skills (including secure circuit and autonomous system design) and practical skills (including reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, malware analysis) of cybersecurity related design and implementation aspects.
Upon completion, students will have mastered these four learning objectives.
Learning Objectives
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be familiar with policies, standards, and guidelines
- Be familiar with cryptography algrithms
- Be familiar with reconnaissance and various types of attacks
- Be familiar with common software vulnerabilities and countermeasures
- Be familiar with hardware security vulnerabilities, attacks, and countermeasures
Students will have a good understanding to the following three questions: What is cybersecurity? Why cybersecurity is important? How to design and implement successful solutions to satisfy security needs. To understand these questions, they will be familiar with fundamental concepts of different areas in cybersecurity such as: external and internal information security threats to an organization and how to analyze and deal with them; mathematical foundations of cryptography; threats and countermeasures; software vulnerabilities and countermeasures; taxonomy of malwares and reverse engineering techniques; different attacks target on computer system.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be competent to design an analysis of hardware security primitives
- Be competent to reverse engineering programs and exploit hardware vulnerabilities
- Be competent to apply knowledge gained in mathematics, statistics, physical sciences, and engineering courses to design algorithms that defend against cyberattacks in autonomous control systems
- Be competent to implement secure control algorithms
- Be competent in common reverse engineering techniques
The students will have theoretical understanding about the cutting-edge techniques in different cybersecurity areas and be competent with them, which enabling them to perform relevant workplace tasks such as: apply reverse engineering techniques to analysis programs; develop algorithms to secure autonomous systems; design and implement solutions in hardware systems.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be competent to understand problem, systematic design, implement and evaluate solutions
- Ability to demonstrate the problem and solutions to audience with various background
- Be competent to work in various teams with different people
ith the practice of course projects, the students will be familiar with critical thinking that enable them to appropriate identify questions, design methodology to solve those questions and finish implementation, systematical evaluate and analysis the result of the design. They will also master both oral and written presentation to audience with various background. These skill sets enable them to fast adapt to industry or academia to pursue greater achievement.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Ability to use cybersecurity knowledge to solve security issues in domains that are less familiar with
- Ability to apply analytic and mathematic methods across domain to solve various problems
- Be competent in the best practices of the student's specialization track
Systematic understanding of different cybersecurity techniques and security principles, enabling them to adopt this skill set to solve security issues in different domains, such as medical, education, etc.
Apply Now!
Required Courses (9 cr hrs)
Students must complete these three courses.
Required Courses
Introduction to Cybersecurity (3 credit hours)
This course covers the history of cybersecurity, cybersecurity frameworks, cyberattacks and countermeasures, cybersecurity risk management.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Become familiar with fundamental cybersecurity concepts, technologies and practices, and develop a foundation for further study in cybersecurity.
- Be familiar with the structure of policies, standards and guidelines.
- Be familiar with fundamentals of cryptography.
Introduction to Hardware Security (3 credit hours)
The course covers Security and trust of hardware systems, cryptography principles, security primitives, counterfeiting activities, IP piracy, reverse engineering, malicious change, hardware Trojans, side channel attacks, physical attacks.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Develop in depth knowledge of microelectronics end-to-end supply chain and how various threats can impact the IC functionality and/or reliability
- Develop general understand of the field of hardward security in terms of vulnerabilities, attacks and countermeasures
- Be proficient in design and analysis of hardware security primitives, such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and true random number generators (TRNG).
- Leaern fundamental cryptographic principles and how they apply to hardward security, trust and assurance.
Securing Autonomous Systems (3 credit hours)
This course covers different security measures for safeguarding against cyberattacks, detecting cyberattacks, and mitigating the effects of cyberattacks on autonomous control systems.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Apply knowledge gained in mathematics, physical sciences and engineering courses to derive mathematical models of typical engineering systems to be controlled
- Provide introductory concepts in feedback control systems
- Introduction to various cyberattacks launched on autonomous control systems
- Apply knowledge gained in mathematics, statistics, physical sciences, and engineering courses to derive algorithms that defend against cyberattacks in autonomous control systems
- Implement secure control algorithms on Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or microcontrolers
Electives (3 cr hrs)
Students select one course as an elective.
Electives
Offensive Computing (3 credit hours)
This course will give students an overview of existing offensive computing techniques, which include well known attacks that break confidentiality, integrity and availability of computing resources. Attacks targeting human weaknesses without taking special care to security will also be discussed.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Be familiar with reconnaissance
- Be familiar with confientiality attacks
- Be familiar with integrity attacks
- Be familiar with availiability attacks
- Be familiar with human weakness attacks
Reverse Engineering and Malware Analysis (3 credit hours)
This course will give students an overview of cutting edge reverse engineering techniques as well as software security and defense practices. Programming experience in C required.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Master reverse engineering tools and techniques
- Be familiar with taxonomy of malware
- Be competent in common anti-reverse engineering techniques such as obfuscation
- Be exposed to advanced techniques like machine learning (ML) security and artifact intelligence (AI) assisted reverse engineering
Software Security (3 credit hours)
Software security fundamentals, secure coding principles and practices, common software vulnerabilities, memory exploits (shell code), vulnerability discovery (e.g., fuzzing and symbolic execution), and defenses against common vulnerability exploitation.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Be familiar with secure coding principles and practice
- Be competent with common softward vulnerabilities
- Be competent with code injection attacks and countermeasures
- Be competent with code reuse attacks and countermeasures
- Be competent with general countermeasures to software attacks
- Be competent with advance program analysis for softward vulenerability discovery