Instructor: Janis Rose, email: jrose2@uis.edu

Course Description: This course introduces the basics of network security, and also describes how the technical decisions associated with network security interact with the values of individuals, organizations, and society. The course includes methods of avoiding, detecting, and analyzing intrusions. Students will examine tradeoffs inherent in security policies, behaviors, and protocols.

Purpose and rationale: The purpose of the course is to educate students about how the technical details of networks and network administration affect people, and how students can make reasonable, justifiable decisions about network security. These decisions should be feasible and practical in a technical sense, and prudent and moral in an ethical sense. Computer security is an important area for students, employers, the country, and the world. Student demand is high, and employers are anxious for their computing professionals to have skills in the area of security. UIS is interested in engaged citizenship and public service. Enhancing network security is a way that UIS and its students can become engaged on the side of the angels in preventing damage to the cyberspace infrastructure from worms, viruses, spyware, and spam. By making security experts more sensitive to their ethical responsibilities, we can also reduce the likelihood that computing professionals abuse their powers. Such issues as user privacy require increased sensitivity when security becomes an emphasis.

Course Objectives: A student who successfully completes this course should be able to:

• Understand and be able to explain at an undergraduate level of complexity the fundamental machine and human relationships that underlie a modern, computer-telecommunications network.
• Dentify common weaknesses and vulnerabilities in computer networks.
• Identify defenses against the common weaknesses and vulnerabilities in B.
• Identify the principal human and organizational stakeholders in network security decisions.
• Articulate prudent tradeoffs in the establishment and implementation of network security protocols and policies.
• Articulate a coherent ethical justification of decisions, policies and protocols. These justifications should be consistent with major principles of applied ethics.

Outline of Topics to be Covered:

• Cyberspace Infrastructure
• Fundamental Principles of Applied Ethics
• Anatomy of the Security Problem
• Types of Cyber Attacks
• Cyber Crimes: Costs and Social Consequences
• Cyber Crimes: Prevention, Detection, and System Survivability
• Cyberspace and Cyber Ethics Today and Beyond.

Textbook: Computer Network Security and Cyber Ethics by Joseph Kizza (2002), McFarland & Co.

Type of instruction and learning activities:

• Students will read the text and web assignments.
• Students will watch and listen to online lectures.
• Students will take quizzes on text content.
• Students will have homework projects, one for each major topic in the outline above.
• Students will participate in Blackboard discussion forum.

Number and type of assignments:

• 7 quizzes
• 7 homework assignments
• 10 online discussions
• Midterm test
• Choice between a final exam and an extended project

GradingCriteria:

• 15% Quizzes
• 30% Homework
• 10% Discussions
• 20% Midterm
• 25% Final Exam or Extended Project