Category: Education

Teaching Privacy Enhancing Technologies at UCL

Last term I had the opportunity and pleasure to prepare and teach the first course on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) at University College London, as part of the MSc in Information Security.

The course covers principally, and in some detail, engineering aspects of PETs and caters for an audience of CS / engineering students that already understands the basics of information security and cryptography (although these are not hard prerequisites). Students were also provided with a working understanding of legal and compliance aspects of data protection regimes, by guest lecturer Prof. Eleni Kosta (Tilburg); as well as a world class introduction to human aspects of computing and privacy, by Prof. Angela Sasse (UCL). This security & cryptographic engineering focus sets this course apart from related courses.

The taught part of the course runs for 20 hours over 10 weeks, split in 10 topics:

Continue reading Teaching Privacy Enhancing Technologies at UCL

UCL Code Breaking Competition

6689260_sModern security systems frequently rely on complex cryptography to fulfil their goals and so it is important for security practitioners to have a good understanding of how cryptographic systems work and how they can fail. The Cryptanalysis (COMPGA18/COMPM068) module in UCL’s MSc Information Security provides students with the foundational knowledge to analyse cryptographic systems whether as part of system development in industry or as academic research.

To give students a more realistic (and enjoyable) experience there is no written exam for this module; instead the students are evaluated based on coursework and a code breaking competition.

UCL has a strong tradition of experimental research and we have been running many student competitions and hacking events in the past. In March 2013 a team directed by Dr Courtois won the UK University Cipher Challenge 2013 award, held as part of the UK Cyber Security Challenge.

This year the competition has been about finding cryptographically significant events in a real-life financial system. The competition (open both to UCL students and those of other London universities) requires the study of random number generators, elliptic curve cryptography, hash functions, exploration of large datasets, programming and experimentation, data visualisation, graphs and statistics.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the competition:

  • Joint 1st prize: Gemma Bartlett. Grade obtained 92/100.
  • Joint 1st prize: Vasileios Mavroudis.  Grade obtained 92/100.
  • 2nd prize: David Kohan Marzagão.  Grade obtained 82/100.

About the winners:

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  • Gemma Bartlett (left) is in her final year at UCL studying for an M.Eng. in Mathematical Computation with a focus on Information Security. Her particular interests include digital forensics. She will be starting a job in this field after graduation.
  • Vasilios Mavroudis (middle) received his B.Sc. in Applied Informatics from the University of Macedonia, Greece in 2012.  He is currently pursuing an M.Sc. in Information Security at UCL. In the past, he has worked as a security researcher in Deutsche Bank, University of California Santa Barbara and at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). His research interests include network and systems security, malware, and applied cryptography.
  • David Kohan Marzagão (right) is currently undertaking a PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of Peter McBurney at King’s College London.  In 2014, he received his BSc in Mathematics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests include cryptography, multi-agent systems, graph theory, and random walks.

Teaching cybersecurity to criminologists

I recently had the pleasure of teaching my first module at UCL, an introduction to cybersecurity for students in the SECReT doctoral training centre.

The module had been taught before, but always from a fairly computer-science-heavy perspective. Given that the students had largely no background in computer science, and that my joint appointment in the Department of Security and Crime Science has given me at least some small insight into what aspects of cybersecurity criminologists might find interesting, I chose to design the lecture material largely from scratch. I tried to balance the technical components of cybersecurity that I felt everyone needed to know (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, included a fair amount of cryptography) with high-level design principles and the overarching question of how we define security. Although I say I designed the curriculum from scratch, I of course ended up borrowing heavily from others, most notably from the lecture and exam material of my former supervisor’s undergraduate cybersecurity module (thanks, Stefan!) and from George’s lecture material for Introduction to Computer Security. If anyone’s curious, the lecture material is available on my website.

As I said, the students in the Crime Science department (and in particular the ones taking this module) had little to no background in computer science.  Instead, they had a diverse set of academic backgrounds: psychology, political science, forensics, etc. One of the students’ proposed dissertation titles was “Using gold nanoparticles on metal oxide semiconducting gas sensors to increase sensitivity when detecting illicit materials, such as explosives,” so it’s an understatement to say that we were approaching cybersecurity from different directions!

With that in mind, one of the first things I did in my first lecture was to take a poll on who was familiar with certain concepts (e.g., SSH, malware, the structure of the Internet), and what people were interested in learning about (e.g., digital forensics, cryptanalysis, anonymity). I don’t know what I was expecting, but the responses really blew me away! The students overwhelmingly wanted to hear about how to secure themselves on the Internet, both in terms of personal security habits (e.g., using browser extensions) and in terms of understanding what and how things might go wrong. Almost the whole class specifically requested Tor, and a few had even used it before.

This theme of being (pleasantly!) surprised continued throughout the term.  When I taught certificates, the students asked not for more details on how they work, but if there was a body responsible for governing certificate authorities and if it was possible to sue them if they misbehave. When I taught authentication, we played a Scattergories-style game to weigh the pros and cons of various authentication mechanisms, and they came up with answers like “a con of backup security questions is that they reveal cultural trends that may then be used to reveal age, ethnicity, gender, etc.”

There’s still a month and a half left until the students take the exam, so it’s too soon to say how effective it was at teaching them cybersecurity, but for me the experience was a clear success and one that I look forward to repeating and refining in the future.