Course Description:
Practicum is traditionally referenced as a course of supervised study in a professional field. In
the context of computing education, it is also used for practices at a lab environment which
emulates the real world situation. With the advancement of computing technology, a lab
environment could be a physical lab or a virtual lab.
This is a practicum course of computer network security where students will learn to create a
virtual computing network environment. Students will then use open source tools to create
different attacking scenarios and then implement defense solutions to protect the network from
those attacks. A major learning outcome is to design an enterprise network with security
consideration to protect from various hacking and intrusion attacks. The course starts with a
brief review of security requirements and then emerges students in various security tools to
experiment on various attacking and defense scenarios.
Approach:
The course adopts the learning-by-doing principle and follows the guideline provided by the
SEcurity EDucation (SEED) project where all the lab exercises are from the SEED project with
modification for clarification and more in-depth traffic analysis. Students will learn how
hackers launch network attacks by practicing these attacks in a Virtual Machine (VM)
environment. Students will then apply defense countermeasures to prevent or mitigate these
attacks.
According to its web site, the SEED project is adopted by hundreds of universities worldwide.
Lab Environment:
Students may download the virtual machines on their personal computing environment and
perform the labs on it. Some labs will require multiple physical computers and students may
team together to do those labs; however, each student submit their own lab report.
Students may also use the computing lab machines where the VMs are preinstalled. [Needs
verification if students could install VMs at a school computing lab.]
Policy on Academic Integrity
Strictly follows the school