CSE447 Security concepts

Graham Farr and Tony Kerr

Prohibitions: CSE4892 and CSE425

This units provides a broad introduction to security issues in information systems. The first part of the unit covers general issues in infomration security, such as physical security; network security; software security; contingency planning; legal issues; management issues.

The second part complements this with selected introductory issues in cryptography: In particular elementary secret-key cryptosystems (transposition, substitution, polyalphabetic, etc.), basic principles of building and combining them, a modern secret-key cryptosystem such as the Data Encryption Standard, one-way functions and public-key cryptosystems, trapdoor functions, relevant notions from computational complexity, specific systems including: Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme, RSA, ElGamal. Comparison of secret- and public-key cryptography.

This unit is a reduced version of CSE425+CSE4892 and is suitable for students who want to achieve a broad understanding of issues in information security, but would also like to cover several other topics in their coursework.

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