Course Title: Secure Programming Environments

Part A: Course Overview

Course Title: Secure Programming Environments

Credit Points: 12

Course Coordinator: Dr Peter Bertok

Course Coordinator Phone: +61 3 9925 1851

Course Coordinator Email:peter.bertok@rmit.edu.au

Course Coordinator Location: 14.11.20

Pre-requisite Courses and Assumed Knowledge and Capabilities

You should have capabilities acquired in Java for Programmers or Programming 2 or Java for C Programmers or in a similar course. In particular, you should be able to:

• write, test and debug small to medium-sized application programs that use inheritance, polymorphism, abstract classes, interfaces, threads and event handling where appropriate
• navigate the Java API to discover suitable interfaces, classes and methods
• use third-party packages in your Java programs

Course Description

This course aims to introduce you to programming in a secure environment. It will introduce basic and some advanced concepts in security, and their implementation
in programming. The focus is on problem solving ability with emphasis on security.
In this course, you will learn the basics of programming in security-conscious environments, such as program communication through fire walls, creation and use of digital signatures and certificates, and authentication. The teaching platform is Java, with standard and additional security extensions.

Objectives/Learning Outcomes/Capability Development

Capabilities developed in this course:
Critical analysis:

• Analyse requirements and constraints for the purpose of designing and implementing secure programming environments;
• Evaluate conceptual and programming solutions for secure programming environments, on the basis of specific requirements and constraints;

• Design and implement secure programming environments that accommodate specified requirements and constraints, based on analysis of requirements and constraints;

• Motivate and explain complex security programming concepts, relevant alternatives and decision recommendations to IT specialists, via technical presentations;

• Effectively apply relevant standards, ethical considerations, and an understanding of privacy issues to designing secure programming environments.

Learning outcomes: Upon successful completion of this course, you should be
able to:

• analyse the security requirements of a programming environment and identify the issues to be solved;
• come up with conceptual solutions to those issues;
• implement a programming solution;
• evaluate solutions in security-conscious environments.

Enabling knowledge and skills:

• • terminology, such as firewalls, proxy servers, security managers, digital digests, signatures, certificates, Java security models, Java cryptography architecture and extension;
• • concepts, such as programming in fire walled environments, SOCKS and other proxying, securing large and web-based applications, program package protecting techniques

Overview of Learning Activities

This course consists of lectures, tutorials, and laboratory classes. The lectures will be devoted to the presentation of new material. The
tutorials reinforce the concepts via exercises, and show the material  from a different perspective. The laboratory sessions will be used for
practical exercises illustrating the material and providing hands-on experience.

Attendance:
While a minimum attendance standard is not compulsory, non-attendance may seriously jeopardise the chances of success in this course. Clearly, non-attendance at an assessment will result in failure of that assessment. Where visa conditions apply, attendance is compulsory.

Overview of Learning Resources

You will make extensive use of computer laboratories and relevant software provided by the School. You will be able to access course information and learning materials through the Learning Hub (also known as online@RMIT) and may be provided with copies of additional materials in class or via email. Lists of relevant reference texts, resources in the library and freely accessible Internet sites will be provided.

Use the RMIT Bookshop’s textbook list search page to find any recommended textbook(s).

Overview of Assessment

The assessment for this course comprises of assignments and a formal written examination.

For standard assessment details, including hurdle requirements, relating to Computer Science and IT courses see: http://www.rmit.edu.au/compsci/cgi