Introduction to Cybersecurity (8ECTS, VC) is a compulsory course for students on the MSc in AI and Cybersecurity. It is also suitable for other MSc level students who have no (or little) background in Cybersecurity/System Security/Cryptography. It covers technical and some non-technical aspects of Cybersecurity. Introduction to Cybersecurity is a new course at the University of Klagenfurt. It is part of our new MSc program “AI and Cybersecurity” and brings together a cohort of students from an international and local background. All lecture materials are available in English language (slides/notes, videos), the lecturers are Dr. Arnab Roy and Prof. Elisabeth Oswald.

Introduction to Cybersecurity covers fundamental aspects of cryptography, advanced cryptographic concepts for secure (privacy preserving) distributed computation, system security and network security (including mobile communications security).

The course spends an initial three weeks in reviewing/introducing basic cryptographic constructions from symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. In the following three weeks we touch on zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption. All these cryptographic techniques are fundamental to modern systems, in particular when it comes to do privacy preserving machine learning. After these initial six weeks we change gear and look at aspects of system security: we discuss authentication and access control, take a detour into embedded systems, and touch on a range of implementation related weaknesses (side channels and faults). Finally we change gear again and look at network security aspects including mobile communications security.

This course is run as a “VC” i.e. we expect attendance and student contributions throughout the term. Students present solutions to exercises and small programming challenges, there are quizzes, and a larger project. In the winter term 2020, the larger projected consists of implementing a specific statistical function in a privacy preserving (MPC) manner, namely via Yao circuits.

The (public) moodle page course in its winter term 2020 edition is here (just log in as guest).