Graduate Certificate in Information Security - Curriculum

Please read the full Graduate Certificate in Information Security program regulations.

The Graduate Certificate in Information Security will be awarded upon completion of 4 courses (12 credits). Students are required to complete the following:

• COMP 604: Enterprise Computer Networks (3-credit core)
• COMP 607: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Information Technology (3-credit core)
• COMP 660: Enterprise Information Security (3-credit core)

And one of the following:

• COMP 656: Cloud Computing (3-credit elective)
• COMP 689: Advanced Distributed Systems (3-credit elective)

COMP 604 - designed to teach students some of the advanced technologies for designing, implementing, and managing enterprise-wide computer networks. COMP 604 will also introduce some fundamental concepts and theories to those students with little knowledge of data communication and computer networks. The course will provide the necessary foundation for students to learn information security principles.

COMP 607 aims to equip the student with the intellectual tools to make effective, reasoned and justifiable moral decisions relating to the IT domain within appropriate legal and social frameworks.  This course will educate students that ethical and legal issues are integral to what security professionals do.

COMP 660 - students will study various security issues associated with the development and deployment of information systems, including Internet-based e-commerce, e-business, and e-service systems, as well as the technologies required to develop secure information systems for enterprises. Students will also learn about the policies and regulations essential to the security of enterprise information systems.

COMP 656 – Cloud Computing is considered one of the top five emerging technologies that will have a major impact on the quality of science and society over next 20 years. It provides a way to centralize the setup, implementation, maintenance, and management of integrated computation services to individual and corporate end users. Cloud computing has attracted great attention in computational research, education, and business communities. It has huge potential to change computing, and provides tremendous research and commercial opportunities as well as great challenges in IT infrastructure and security, computation policy and industry regulation.

This course provides a graduate level comprehensive introduction to cloud computing, with an emphasis on advanced topics such as Cloud Computing architecture, security, key technologies and applications. Students will be able to identify the architecture and infrastructure of cloud computing, explain the core issues of cloud computing such as security, privacy and interoperability, and provide the appropriate cloud computing solutions and recommendations.

COMP 689 deals with the major recent developments in distributed systems technology, explains the principles of distributed systems such as communication, naming, synchronization, replication, fault tolerance and security, using many examples and case studies. It covers architectures in distributed systems, reflecting the progress that has been made on organizing distributed systems, and new topics such as peer-to-peer computing, sensor networks, Web services, Grid computing, virtualization, cloud computing, and its root in essential distributed system mechanism, and self-management of distributed systems.

Permission of the program director is required before courses are taken for GC InfoSec program credit outside Athabasca University.