MSIA Knowledge Support Courses

Students are expected to have a strong background in computer science or information technology. Those who do not have an undergraduate degree in computer science, computer engineering or software engineering may be required to complete specified knowledge courses as a condition for admission. The courses to be taken will depend upon previous academic coursework. The DSU equivalents of these courses are:

CSC 509 System and Security Programming
(3 credit hours)

The course will examine programs and programming from the perspective of systems-level operations and security issues. The course will address appropriate operating systems, utilities and tools; malware fundamentals; systems-level programming; and scripting. Understanding the essentials of programming from device drivers and assembly language through scripting languages for automating processes and gluing together other utility programs will be the course objective.

Coursework will focus on understanding and reading ability for such programs and scripts; students will develop the ability to understand and modify such programs in order to tailor them to particular environments. Open source tools will be a consistent theme throughout the course. Prerequisite: Two course programming sequence (CSC 150 and CSC 250 or an equivalent sequence).

Math 509 Foundational Mathematics (3 credit hours)

A foundational course in number theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra and discrete mathematics. Students entering the program are expected to have had appropriate math coursework, including calculus, statistics, an introduction to applied mathematics, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics. Those who lack this math background will be required to take a DSU foundational math course (MATH 509). Math 509 assumes students have had calculus and statistics.

INFA 532 System and Network Security (3 credit hours)
This course is designed to expose students to threats and defense mechanisms for computer systems and networks to ensure availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Topics include firewall design, host hardening, access control, intrusion detection systems, system auditing, and defense techniques against threats such as social engineering, phishing, denial of service, malware, and buffer-overflow.

INFA 534 Ethical Hacking (3 credit hours)
This course serves as an introduction to offensive security topics with an emphasis on ethical hacking. Special attention is paid to the tools and techniques used in information gathering, scanning, exploitation, and maintaining access. These topics will be discussed in terms of local network and web penetration testing. The goal of this course is to expose students current techniques used by attackers and provide strategies for defending against these attacks.

INFS 750 IT Infrastructure, Technology and Network Management (3 credit hours)

A study of IT infrastructure, systems, and networks according to the OSI model. Special consideration is given to Internet, Intranet, local and wide area network design, technical requirements, operation, and management. Prerequisite: INFS 601 or equivalent.