Security course at Cambridge

I have taken over the second-year Security course at Cambridge, which is traditionally taught in Easter term. From the end of April onwards I will be teaching three lectures per week. Taking advantage of the fact that Cambridge academics own the copyright and performance rights on their lectures, I am making all my undergraduate lectures available at no charge on my YouTube channel frankstajanoexplains.com. My lecture courses on Algorithms and on Discrete Mathematics are already up and I’ll be uploading videos of the Security lectures as I produce them, ahead of the official lecturing dates. I have uploaded the opening lecture this morning. You are welcome to join the class virtually and you will receive exactly the same tuition as my Cambridge students, at no charge. 


The philosophy of the course is to lead students to learn the fundamentals of security by “studying the classics” and gaining practical hands-on security experience by recreating and replicating actual attacks. (Of course the full benefits of the course are only reaped by those who do the exercises, as opposed to just watching the videos.)


This is my small contribution to raising a new generation of cyber-defenders, alongside the parallel thread of letting young bright minds realise that security is challenging and exciting by organising CTFs (Capture-The-Flag competitions) for them to take part in, which I have been doing since 2015 and continue to do. On that note, any students (undergraduate, master or PhD) currently studying in a university in UK, Israel, USA, Japan, Australia and France still have a couple more days to sign up for our 2022 Country to Country CTF, a follow-up to the Cambridge to Cambridge CTF that I co-founded with Howie Shrobe and Lori Glover at MIT in 2015. The teams will mix people at different levels so no prior experience is required. Go for it!

3 thoughts on “Security course at Cambridge

  1. Thank you! This is an amazing addition to the freely available education resources that are out there. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Frank Stajano and Markus Kuhn are both excellent teachers and being able to get access to this material for literally nothing is mental.

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