In the press and in popular movies we hear and see that hackers break into critical systems, get access to classified information and trace your network activities with just a few clicks of a button. But are such scenarios real? How do attacks look like, how can we protect against such attacks and how can we securely exchange data over the Internet?
This course is intended for students with a solid understanding of TCP/IP who want to know the details of protocols such as HTTPS, SSH, DNSSEC, IPSec, WPA etc. It was designed for students following a M.Sc. program in the area of Computer Science, but can also be followed by students at the end of their B.Sc. or start of their Ph.D. program.
To follow this course, some basic programming skills (C, Java, ...) are required. In addition, you should be able to use Linux systems and set-up and maintain Virtual Machines (VirtualBox, Vagrant, Ubuntu).
Anna Sperotto is associate professor at the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the University of Twente. Her research interests are network monitoring and modeling, intrusion detection, network security, and network management.
Ralph Holz is associate professor at the University of Twente. Before joining the University of Twente, he was Lecturer in Networks and Security at the University of Sydney, Australia. Until 2016, he was a Researcher at NICTA (later Data61), also in Sydney, where he worked on network security. He hold a PhD from Technical University of Munich. He did both his post-grad and under-grad studies at Eberhard Karls University, Tuebingen, one of Germany’s classic universities.
Mattijs Jonker is assistant professor at the professor at the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the University of Twente. His research is on network security in the broad sense and involves extensive data science and Internet measurement.
Aiko Pras is Professor in the area of Network Operations and Management at the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands. He gives many courses in Networking, including Network Security (NS) and Internet Management and Measurements (IMM). He chairs the IFIP Technical Committee 6 on Communications Systems and the EU-FP7 Flamingo Network of Excellence on management of the Future Internet.
The Open edX platform works best with current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or with Internet Explorer version 9 and above.
See our list of supported browsers for the most up-to-date information.
The idea behind this course is that students "learn by doing". For that purpose students perform many exercises that need to be closely coupled to the MOOC platform. OpenEdx provides us the right environment for that.
If you created an account on our OpenEdx platform but did not receive an activation email, please check your SPAM folder. Many mail systems conceive such activation emails as SPAM.
On the Internet and YouTube you can find many videos and other resources that explain how to setup and use VirtualBox. Once VirtualBox is installed and tested, you should install Vagrant, for which you can also find many resources on the Internet. Note that you don't have to create any vagrant configuration files; such files will be provided to you as part of the course.
Occasionaly we find that problems occur while installing and using the VM. Sometimes problems are caused by outdated equipment, such as 10 year old laptops. In such cases you should try to arrange a newer machine, and try on that machine if the problems are gone. Problems may also occur if (Linux) kernel extensions are installed, such as grsec. In such cases some tweaking of configurations and options may solve the problems. Finally we sometimes observe that, especially with Windows systems, shared directories between guest and host OS may not work. This may be due to timing issues, and sometimes a restart of the VM solves the problem.