Curriculum

We will teach the students how to operate a linux based system, with an emphasis on command lines, executions of programs, and basic scripts. We will also emphasize the networking and web technologies, which are at the heart of cybersecurity. We will review secure connections between computers, the foundations of the internet, and the security issues regarding connections to web services. Our instructors will have plenty of hands-on activities to dive into these concepts.

We will study how to encode information to make it understandable by a computer and how to protect it from errors that happen during communication. There will be an emphasis on binary encoding, hexadecimal encoding, ASCII, UTF8, and Barcodes. We will demonstrate error correction through fun games in class. Time permitting, we will also study QR codes which are just about everywhere these days.

Cryptography is the cornerstone of cybersecurity. The students will learn the concepts of encryption, digital signatures and hashing. We will review historical examples such as the Caesar cipher and play games of encryption/decryption. We will demonstrate these concepts by competing in a cryptocurrency challenge developed exclusively for the camp where participants score points by mining on the blockchain.

We will illustrate all the new concepts we've learned by playing Capture the Flag Competitions (CTFs) which are challenges where each team scores point by solving problems related to some of the concepts we've learned. We will use the CyberHub platform maintained by the Florida Center for Cybersecurity which contains countless CTF challenges. We will have the assistance of the Whitehatters Computer Security Club (WCSC) who regularly compete in similar events. Also assisting us is Dr. Danilo Gligoroski, our visiting faculty who was the coach for the Norwegian team on European Cyber Security Challenge in 2017!