EP2790 HT24 Security Analysis of Large-Scale Computer Systems (50486)

Welcome to EP2790

Welcome to an exciting course about the challenge of doing threat modelling and risk assessments of  IT infrastructures in modern organisations. Mastering this challenge is of course key for any successful business and our society at large. Hope you will enjoy the course!

The easiest way to contact us, the teachers, is by Canvas or email. 

/Mathias, Yekatierina, and Yacine 

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Motivation

Companies today have thousands of software-based computer systems that all are depending on one another in a large complex network, a system-of-systems. That cyberattacks succeed is to a large extent due to this complexity. The security engineers at a company need to understand the whole system with all its potential vulnerabilities, while an attacker only needs find one way in. Luckily for the defenders, as they have access to the system environment they don't have to start on a blank sheet and discover the environment as the attacker has to do. To add to the complexity, attackers can use a large number of different attack techniques but there also exist plenty of defense mechanisms. Coming up with and maintaining an overall defence solution that at the same time enables the supported business to thrive is a great challenge.  

This course teaches a threat modeling-based method for analyzing cybersecurity risks for systems-of-systems. It includes developing and combining models for computer system resilience, threat actor capabilities, and business impacts of realized threats into an overall cyber risk assessment. Moreover the course addresses how cyber risk analysis is used for identifying and arguing for cost efficient defense mechanism selection for protecting the analyzed system-of-systems. 

 

Intended learning outcomes 

After passing the course, the students should be able to:

  • model threats in large-scale computer systems (including software, networks etc),
  • describe and evaluate attacks in large-scale computer systems
  • carry out risk analysis based on a model
  • describe defence mechanisms for computer system and how they relate to vulnerabilities and attacks
  • report and present models, a cybersecurity risk analysis, and defense strategies for a computer system

In order to:

  • understand and explain which threats a specific system can have
  • understand and explain how attacks work and propagate through a system architecture
  • argue why certain risks should be prioritised
  • choose an effective defense to decrease risk.

Read the course syllabus page for more information about the course.

Link to Zoom room

https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/62309989525 Links to an external site. , Passcode: KTH-EP279