Cybersecurity

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to the principles of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity, also called computer security or IT security, refers to the study of techniques to protect computing systems from attacks that threaten data confidentiality, system integrity and availability. By modeling, analyzing, and evaluating the security of computer systems, students will learn to find weaknesses in software, hardware, networks, data storage systems, mobile applications, and the Internet, and identify current security practices and defenses to protect these systems. Hong Kong China (HT): This is an introductory course on cybersecurity. It will cover the full spectrum of the security domain: basic cybersecurity principles, system security, hardware security, web security and network security. Uniquely, this course will tackle the immediate challenges of the AI era, examining adversarial machine learning (ML security), LLM jailbreaking (LLM security), and the security of agentic AI workflows (Agent security). We will introduce fundamental cybersecurity principles and provide concrete examples of security issues that arise when these principles are violated. We then discuss techniques to detect, mitigate and prevent potential security issues.