Curriculum Overview
Curriculum Overview
The Cybersecurity Offense and Defense Certificate (CODC) is a for-credit, graduate level program, delivered 100% online and upon completion students receive an official certificate from The Ohio State University Graduate School. The CODC curriculum 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 currently include live synchronous class times.
Certificate Learning Objectives
Students enrolled in the certificate program will learn both the fundamental science (including cryptography and game theory) and practical skills (including reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, malware analysis) of cyber offense and defense.
Accordions
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be familiar with information security threats and countermeasures
- Be familiar with cryptography algorithms
- Be familiar with network security protocols
- Be familiar with common software vulnerabilities and countermeasures
- Be familiar with fundamental concepts of different real-world attacks
- Be familiar with taxonomy of malwares and reverse engineering techniques
The students will gain 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 of an enterprise. To understand these questions, they will gain familiarity with fundamental tenets of cybersecurity such as: external and internal information security threats to an organization and how to analyze and deal with them; mathematical foundations of cryptography; network security threats and countermeasures; software vulnerabilities and countermeasures; taxonomy of malwares and reverse engineering techniques; different real-world attacks on computer systems.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be competent to implement attacks against different cryptography algorithms
- Be competent to reverse engineering programs and exploit software vulnerabilities
- Be competent to protect software against reverse engineering and software vulnerabilities
- Be competent to different network-based attacks
Students will gain a theoretical understanding about cutting-edge techniques in different cybersecurity areas and be competent with them, enabling them to perform relevant workplace tasks such as: apply reverse engineering techniques; use anti-reverse engineering techniques to protect programs; discover software vulnerabilities such as code injection and code reuse, and apply countermeasures to protect them; design secure networks based on the understanding of network security issues.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Be competent to understand problem of significance, engage in 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
With 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. Students will use examples and case studies from cybersecurity to hone their problem-solving skills.
The following learning outcomes are associated with this learning goal:
- Ability to use cybersecurity knowledges to solve security issues in domains that are less familiar with
- Ability to apply analytical and mathematical methods across domain to solve various problems
- Be competence 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 health sciences, business, etc.
Points of Pride
Required Courses (9 cr hrs)
Students must complete these three courses
Accordions
Introduction to Cybersecurity (3 credit hours)
This course covers the technical fundamentals of data, software, component, network, and system security. Cybersecurity from an organizational and societal view point, including human factors.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives of the course are as follows:
- Become familiar with fundamental cybersecurity concepts, technologies and practices, and develop a foundation for further study in cybersecurity
- Become familiar with fundamentals of data security
- Become familiar with fundamentals of software security
- Become familiar with fundamentals of connection/network security
Information Security (3 credit hours)
This course covers th introduction to security of digital information; threats and attacks; regulations; risk management; attack detection and response; cryptography; forensics; technical training and certifications.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives for this course are:
- Be competent with information security governance, and related legal and regulatory issues
- Be competent with understanding external and internal information security threats to an organization
- Be competent with information security awareness and a clear understanding of its importance
- Be competent with how threats to an organization are discovered, analyzed, and dealt with
- Be familiar with a high-level understanding of how information security functions in an organization
- Be familiar with the structure of policies, standards and guidelines
Software Security (3 credit hours)
This course covers 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 software 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 advanced program analysis for software vulnerability discovery
Electives (3 cr hrs)
Students select one course as an elective.
Accordions
Network Security (3 credit hours)
This course covers security threats and services, elements of cryptography, protocols for security services, network and internet security, advanced security issues and technologies.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives of the course are as follows:
- Be competent with some protocols for security reasons.
- Be competent with network security threats and countermeasures.
- Be familiar with network security designs using available secure solutions. (such as PGP, SSL, IPSec, and firewalls)
- Be familiar with advanced security issues and technologies (such as DDoS attack detection and containment, anonymous communications, and security properties testing, verification and design).
- Be exposed to original research in network security.
Introduction to Cryptography (3 credit hours)
This course covers the foundations of cryptography; mathematical formulations/proofs of security goals; theory and practical constructions of encryption schemes, MACs, digital signatures; zero-knowledge proof systems; cryptographic protocols.
Course Objectives: The learning objectives of the course are as follows:
- Students are expected to be comfortable with mathematical reasoning.
- Master various symmetric-key and public-key encryption schemes.
- Be competent with basic cryptographic protocols such as key exchange, identification, and commitment schemes.
- Be familiar with cryptographic hash functions, message authentication codes, and digital signatures.
- Be familiar with mathematical foundations of cryptography and mathematical formulations of security goals.
- Be exposed to zero-knowledge proof systems.
- Be exposes to advanced cryptographic protocols such as electronic voting and digital cash.
- Be expose to cryptographic attacks.
Offensive Security (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 of the course are as follows:
- Be familiar with reconnaissance.
- Be familiar with confidentiality attacks.
- Be familiar with integrity attacks.
- Be familiar with availability attacks.
- Be familiar with human weakness attacks.
Reverse Engineering & 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 of the course are as follows:
- Master reverse engineering tools and techniques.
- Be familiar with taxonomy of malware.
- Be competent in common reverse engineering techniques.
- Be competent in common anti-reverse engineering techniques such as obfuscation.
- Be exposed to advance techniques like machine learning (ML) security and artifact intelligence (AI) assisted reverse engineering.