CSCE 727: Information Warfare

Spring 2017

Instructor: Csilla Farkas

Class time: Tuesday, Thursday 11:40 am – 12:55 pm

Classroom: SWRG 2A11

Prerequisite(s) or corequisite(s): CSCE 522 or permission of instructor

Course objectives:

The objective of the course is to provide the students with an understanding of information warfare principles and technologies. This course is intended to be appropriate for a broad range of professionals interested in information security. The main units of the proposed course are: 1) basic information warfare concepts, 2) offensive information warfare, and 3) defensive information warfare. Vulnerability and risk analysis methods and current information warfare technologies are presented. In addition to cyber security, physical security, ethics, and legal considerations are also addressed during the course.

Basic Bibliography

Required:

· D. Denning: Information Warfare and Security (Addison Wesley, 1998, ISBN: 0201433036)

· Online reading assignments

Office Hours: Tuesday, Thursday 10:30 – 11:30 am; or by appointment

Student Work:

• Project: there will be one project with a final submission of a research proposal. The goal of the project is that the students will acquire detailed understanding in an information warfare topic and identify research problems to be solved and propose a solution to that problem. Students must present related materials and their findings in the class. The aim of the project is to develop critical thinking skills.
• Class Presentation: Students will be required to identify new materials relevant to the discussion topics. Selected materials will be presented in class by the students.
• Homework: there will be several homework assignments based on textbook material and reading assignments.

Grades: Will be calculated from grades received for Project (35%), presentation of related work (25%), homework assignments (40%).

Final grades are calculated from a total score of 100:

90 < A, 87 < B+ <= 90, 80 < B <= 87, 76 < C+ <= 80, 65 < C <= 76, 60 < D+ <= 65, 50 < D <= 60

Tentative Topics

Fundamental IW concepts

Week 1: Theory of Information Warfare, Assessing the Problem (Ch1)

Week 2: Offensive and Defensive Information Warfare (Ch2)

Week 3: Current trends, IW Community (Online materials)

Offensive Activities

Week 4: Opens Sources and Perception Management

Week 5: Intelligence, Corporate Espionage (Ch 5, 6)

Week 6: Cyber Crime – Fraud and Abuse (Ch 7, 8, 9)

Week 7: Hacking, Identity Theft

Week 8-9: Monitoring – Eavesdropping, Traffic Analysis

Defensive Information Warfare

Week 10: National Security and Cyber Warfare (Ch. 10,11)

Week 11: Legal Aspect of Cyber Warfare (Ch 3, 4)

Week 12: Early Warning and Cyber Security Policy (Ch 12,13)

Week 13-15: Computing Technologies for IW