Building secure software is an intricate task that involves careful design of both preemptive and corrective measures. This course covers the secure development lifecycle where students learn about techniques to model security threats, follow secure coding standards and perform security-focused testing to prevent software to expose vulnerabilities. Students learn how to combine tools of various natures to identify threats as part of a continuous integration pipeline. The course also addresses data privacy and governance issues, including (indigenous) data sovereignty principles.
The course is dedicated to fourth year students with both an empirical (audit of open source software) and ethical hacking (secure coding, reconnaissance, fuzzing, and pen-testing) focus. More details available on the official course page.
Amongst other topics, students learn about:
- Secure software development lifecycle
- Threat modelling and risk assessment
- Secure coding standards and practices
- Basic cryptography and key management
- Security-focused testing, including fuzzing and penetration testing
- Māori data governance and sovereignty principles