University of Padua - BSc in Computer Science
CyberSecurity: Principles and Practice
Academic Year: 2021/2022

Lecturer: Mauro Conti

Note: In this page you will find updated information about the course.
(students are invited to visit often this page).





Language: The course and the exam will be in English.

Credits: 6 CFU.

Schedule: I semester (course schedule is published HERE).

Mailing List: Students enrolled for this course are invited to join Moodle.

Language: The course and the exam will be in English.

Credits: 6 CFU.

Course Content:

The course covers the major practical aspects of CyberSecurity. This is a practical course. We present each topic with a theoretical perspective (~30% of the time), followed by a set of exercises (~70% of the time). The exercises are in the format of a Capture The Flag, where the student is asked to solve a puzzle to obtain a secret message (also known as flag). The topics are grouped into four areas.
  • Cryptography: ciphers; hash functions; symmetric/asymmetric encryption.
  • Web Vulnerabilities: bad programming practices; injections; language vulnerabilities.
  • Reverse Engineering: reversing techniques; anti-debug; patching.
  • Pawning: buffer overflow; defenses; Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attack; Global Offset Table (GOT) attack.
For each topic there will be a theoretical and a practical lesson.

Grading Criteria:

The exam takes the form of a Capture the Flag , with a set of exercises, selected from all the topics of the course.
Students can pass the exam also through Intermediary Evaluations: during the course will be provided three practical evaluations (also following the Capture the Flag format), each one covering a different subset of the program topics.
Alternatively, students can propose/discuss with the lecturer a possible security-related project to be carried out as a final exam.


Last update: 2020-09-22
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