SIT719 - Analytics for Security and Privacy

Year:

2023 unit information

Enrolment modes: Trimester 1: Burwood (Melbourne), Waurn Ponds (Geelong), Online
Trimester 2: Burwood (Melbourne), Waurn Ponds (Geelong), Online
Trimester 3: Burwood (Melbourne), Waurn Ponds (Geelong), Online
Credit point(s): 1
EFTSL value: 0.125
Prerequisite:

Nil

Corequisite:

Nil

Incompatible with:

Nil

Study commitment

Students will on average spend 150 hours over the teaching period undertaking the teaching, learning and assessment activities for this unit.

Scheduled learning activities - campus

1 x 2 hour online class per week, 1 x 1 hour workshop each week.

Scheduled learning activities - online

Online independent and collaborative learning including 1 x 2 hour online class per week (recordings provided), 1 x 1 hour online workshop each week.

Content

The increased size of computer networks has led to extensive generation of data collected for network defence. A need has arisen for security experts that understand how to build analytics that make use of this data in order to detect or prevent attacks. This unit will provide students with the fundamental tools to understand this domain of cyber-security. Students will examine this challenge from multiple perspectives. The unit starts from the basics of building scripts to answer questions of large packet captures as a foundational skillset. Once students are comfortable working with large data sets, they will use this new skill to study several supervised machine learning approaches and apply them to real-world network datasets to build analytics that has been shown to be able to detect various malicious attacks. After becoming comfortable with supervised approaches, students will pivot to examining unsupervised methods for network defence, an important topic, since frequently there are insufficient available examples of malicious behaviour to train good models.

Finally students will study the ethical implications of dealing with large datasets that arise in these contexts by examining privacy attacks that have been developed against large datasets and their associated analytics. All these topics will be explored through scaffolded programming assignments designed to be challenging for a student of any level of programming or mathematical experience. At the end of the unit students will have a solid grounding in how modern analytics work and how they can be applied to network defence.

Hurdle requirement

To be eligible to obtain a pass in this unit, students must meet certain milestones as part of the portfolio.

Unit Fee Information

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