As anybody, familiar with 1970s sitcoms can confirm, Mel, Alice's cook used to say: 

*“the best defense is a good offen...

As anybody, familiar with 1970s sitcoms can confirm, Mel, Alice's cook used to say: 

*“the best defense is a good offense”.*

In cybersecurity, a similar saying would be that in order to know how to secure something, one needs first to know how to compromise &amp; break it.

This is exactly what the MODAL offers to do. Through a set of lessons, tutorials, and challenges, we will understand — and try — how to “break things”. This can include topics such as:

- TCP Connection hijacking &amp; SYN flooding
- SQL Injection attacks on WWW servers
- Heartbleed - that SSL bug that caused the whole Internet to flip out
- DNS Cache Poisoning
- ... 
 
We will also call on outside experts, to present their experiences, favorite attacks, and possible countermeasures.

The practical part of this course consists of a set of tutorials and a set of challenges.

- Tutorials: are optional, and serve to help students who need them acquire a certain set of skills. Each tutorial requires a submission of some code, which will be evaluated, and a grade (0-5) will be given.
 
- Challenges: each represent "a thing to hack", such as DNS, or TCP, or DHCP, or invoking a buffer overflow, or performing a man-in-the-middle attack. Challenges will each have an explanation, and supporting material, for what is expected - but will require independent thinking. Each challenge requires a submission of some code, which will be evaluated, and a grade (0-10) will be given. Note that a code submission that "does the job, nothing more, nothing less" will be graded 5. Grades in the interval (5-10) reflect an additional effort, such as highly modular code, flexible, robust, or supporting different attack approaches. 
 
You're encouraged to work in a small group of 1-2 students for each challenge.

You will choose to work on challenges in the order you like, and you will do however many you want - or, need, in order to get enough points to pass the course. 

IT Modal - Cybersecurity — the Hacker eXperience

École Polytechnique

Since its creation in 1794, École Polytechnique has been producing and sharing multidisciplinary knowledge at the highest level, for its students, for companies and for society, by developing an entrepreneurial spirit, boldness and a sense of general interest in its three fundamental missions of education, research and innovation.

Ecole polytechnique

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