[hacs] Education

[Michael Scott]

Hello Fellow HACers,

As you may recall from our last meeting, a group of us got together to
design a syllabus for a proposed “International Masters Degree in
Crypto-Programming”.

The modules we came up with were

   -

   Crypto (symmetric)
   -

   Crypto (Asymmetric)
   -

   Architecture and Embedded Programming
   -

   Network Security
   -

   Crypto Programming
   -

   Side Channel attacks/defences
   -

   Protocols and Standards
   -

   Secure Programming
   -

   Formal Methods, Verification and Testing
   -

   Crypto law and Ethics

There was also to be a final “Practicum”/Mini-Thesis component. None of
this was finalized or set in stone, not even the name of the degree.

We can as a group advance this project in a number of ways. Most obviously,
if the above list of modules is acceptable as a starting point, then there
is a need to flesh out each module in much more detail.

To briefly recap on the motivation:

If our aim is to encourage the development of High Assurance Crypto
Software, then education needs to be a big part of that. We can all point
to horror stories about poor quality crypto code. However a lot of that, I
would suggest, is down to an educational deficit, rather than just reckless
incompetence.

A lot of real-world crypto code is being written by otherwise competent
software engineers who are unfortunately blissfully unaware of the “tricks
of the trade”. Many will have done a course in cryptology, but most likely
only at the undergraduate level. There are a host of cyber-security
master’s degrees out there, but most don’t cover the kind of stuff that a
crypto programmer needs to know.


Mike Scott
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/hacs/attachments/20170203/4c8047a0/attachment.html>