Fall 2026 Schedule
Friday lecture-and-lab meetings from 1:30–3:20 PM in the MIP Policy Studio, beginning September 25, 2026.
Class meets Fridays from 1:30–3:20 PM in the MIP Policy Studio (Encina Hall basement). All times are Pacific Time. Lab instructions and assigned systems will be available in the course console. Students will receive individual console invitations before the first lecture-and-lab meeting.
Networking Foundations
Course logistics, why cybersecurity matters for policy, what hacking is, abstraction, and the layers of the Internet.
Network and Wi-Fi Security
DNS, ARP, BGP, packet flow, wireless protocols, authentication, and authorized traffic analysis.
Web Applications, Part 1
The pre-web world, HTTP requests and responses, methods, state and cookies, the same-origin policy, debuggers and proxies, and a first attack: insecure direct object references.
Web Applications, Part 2
Cross-site scripting, SQL injection, the confused deputy, and where in the stack each attack actually runs.
No Class - Instructor is Sick
No class meeting.
Attacking AI Systems
Prompt injection, data exposure, unsafe tool use, and attacks against AI-enabled application features.
Buffer Overflows and Exploits
Process memory, stack corruption, control-flow hijacking, debugging, and exploit construction.
Attacking with AI
AI-assisted reverse engineering and exploit development with Ghidra and a course-provided GLM harness.
Cryptography - Remote (class on Zoom)
Ciphers, symmetric and public-key systems, hashing, and the implementation mistakes that undermine them.
Thanksgiving Recess
No class meeting.
Review and Career Advice
Course synthesis, continued learning, cybersecurity careers, and professional responsibility.