Contents

Subject Description

INFO30006 Information Security is a class about the human, organizational, and technical aspects of information security. It is a subject that is designed to be accessible to students from a range of backgrounds, including design, science, information systems and computer science.

In the class we’ll cover a range of topics from a variety of perspectives, notable including voices from:

  • Industry
  • Academia
  • Government

  • Civil Society We’ll be bringing these in through readings, guest lectures, and case studies. We also hope to give you a taster of practical skills through the tutorials.

    While this is just the first step in your journey to becoming an information security professional, we hope that you’ll leave the subject with a better understanding of the field, and a desire to learn more.

The following people are involved in this subject in Semester 2, 2024:

Principal Subject Coordinator: Dr. Suelette Dreyfus

  • Email: suelette@unimelb.edu.au
  • Responsibilities: Oversee the subject, deliver lectures, and develop assessment materials
  • Office Hours: By Appointment

Subject Coordinator: Dr. Shaanan Cohney

  • Email: cohneys@unimelb.edu.au
  • Responsibilities: Deliver lectures, develop assessment materials, help with student queries
  • Office Hours: By Appointment

Subject Coordinator: Dr. Chris Ewin

  • Email: cewin@unimelb.edu.au
  • Responsibilities: Deliver lectures, develop assessment materials, help with student queries
  • Office Hours: By Appointment

Head Tutor: Nataliia Tashevtseva

Tutors:

  • Emma Baillie

  • Mark Bloom

  • Isaac Morris

Lectures

Each week, you are expected to attend the lecture. If nothing else, please attend the first lecture to meet some of your classmates and enjoy our return to campus.

The primary ways we’ll use lectures are:

  • To present the principles of the subject, illustrated by examples.
  • To introduce the material that will be developed in tutorials.
  • To make announcements about the subject, particularly about the syllabus and assessment.
  • To inspire you to conduct the necessary work to learn the subject material It is intended that lectures this semester will have interactive elements, to incentivize attendance and to promote engaged learning.

We expect that you attend lectures as we do not guarantee that lecture material will be made available online—we include a substantial number of guests, many of whom request that sessions not be recorded. This is in keeping with University policy that permits outside speakers to request that their sessions not be recorded.

Therefore it is crucial that you attend lectures, and that you take notes. We will provide a set of lecture slides, but these are not designed to be a substitute for attending lectures. They are designed to be a reference for you to check your notes against.

Lecture Slides

Slides for this class will be used as a learning and presentation aid—and some of them are intentionally not designed to be study material. The ideal slide off which to study looks different to one used to best teach a class, despite the fact that many classes you may have previously taken have used the same slides for both purposes.

Tutorials

Each week starting from Week 1 of semester, you will be expected to attend a one-hour tutorial.

The main purposes of workshops are:

  • To give you an opportunity to raise questions about the subject.
  • To clarify any problem that you are having.
  • To discuss alternative solutions to the assigned exercises.
  • To independently implement one or more of those solutions.
  • To develop your confidence in using computers to solve problems.

You will get much more benefit from the tutorial if you ask questions and contribute to the discussion. That can only happen if you prepare in advance.

Our staff will also provide some assistance outside of tutorial through the Discussion Forum on Ed—please use this with aplomb! The questions you ask will also be useful to your peers, and to future iterations of the subject.

Expectations

Like any class, we require a certain level of buy-in and behaviour to make things run smoothly and fairly. Our expectations from you include but are not limited to those for all CIS students at the University of Melbourne.

Seeking Further Assistance

Your first port of call when seeking help should be the class website, followed by Ed, where you can post questions for staff, or other students, to answer. Even if you don’t have questions of your own, you are likely to be able to benefit by reading other students’ queries and will perhaps even able to post answers to help them out. Staff will routinely monitor the forums, and when necessary, provide additional answers to questions. You should also feel free to approach the lecturers for help. Immediately after each lecture or during office hours is usually a good time to ask quick questions, or to request appointments for longer discussions. You may also make contact by email to ask questions and to set appointments.

If there are external issues causing problems with your studies, there are also a number of avenues available. While your staff, including your tutors, are not trained support staff, they may be able to help resolve course related issues or direct you to services that can better assist you. Some resources that you should be aware of:

  • Student Equity and Disability Support: This University Office supports students with disabilities, medical conditions, with religious needs, carers, elite athletes and performers, and members of the armed forces/emergency workers.
  • Counselling & Psychological Services (CAPS): The University of Melbourne Counselling and Psychological Services (CAPS) provides free, confidential, short-term professional counselling to currently enrolled students, as well as a range of workshops, mental health training, and helpful resources. This includes a 24/7 crisis line.
  • Stop1: The centralized student support service that manages enrolments, finance, and more.
  • Academic Skills: Can help with acclimatizing to the professional environment of a University, and studying in Australia

Assessment

The assessment structure is as follows:

Syntax Timing (tenative) Weighting
Group Research Presentation - Assignment 1 Week 6 10%
Group Research Report - Assignment 2 Due Week 9 40%
Reflection Essay - Assignment 3 Week 12 10%
Exam Two Hours, Exam Period 40%

Group Research Project - Assignment 2

A significant portion of the work in this class will be a group research project. This project will be conducted in groups of four, and will be assessed in two parts:

  • A presentation with draft slides due further in advance and final slide decks due prior to the presentation
  • A research report due in Week 8 that addresses the same topic as the presentation, integrating feedback from the presentation
    • Expectations for the research report are for that of a research conference paper (though we allow minor variations in format or style)
Reflection Essay - Assignment 3

We will also ask you to write a short reflection essay of 500 words on an InfoSec event/talk you attend during the semester. This is designed to help you reflect on the material you are learning in the subject, and to help you think about how it applies to the real world. We will provide more details on this individual assessment closer to the date.

Exam

The written two-hour examination at the end of semester is worth 40% of your overall mark and will be open book. Further details on the exam will be provided closer to the date of the exam as the University is still finalising the exam options for staff.

A sample exam will be made available closer to the date of the exam.

There is no hurdle in this subject

Academic Integrity

You are not permitted to use ChatGPT or any other automated text generation tool for any of the assessments in this subject. This is considered a substantial breach of academic integrity and will be treated as such. We have prepared detailed guidelines on academic integrity for this subject, which are available on the subject website.

We are also well aware of the many different strategies that students have used in the past to violate these policies, and routinely refer students to FEIT. Our staff have sophisticated tools to check for violations of this policy.

More importantly, it is not in your interest to violate this policy, as your learning is contingent on you doing the work. You are spending your time and money on the subject, and owe it to yourself to get out what you can. If you are struggling, your staff are here to support you and help you get on track. We can not do so unless you respect the need for honesty.

Assigned Text

The prescribed text is Security Engineering by Ross Anderson (Third Edition, Wiley, 2020).

Older editions of the textbook feature substantially different content—you may experience difficulty following along in one of these.

Subject Web Page

You are expected to visit both Ed and the course website every two or three days and read any subject announcements.