IST 815: Foundations of Information Security and Assurance [Fall 2025]
Tuesday, 6:00-9:00 PM @ Keller Building 115
Overview
- Instructor: Minhao Cheng (mmc7149@psu.edu)
- Office hours: Tuesday 1-2 PM or by appointment @ Westgate E390
- Teaching assistant:
- Zhimeng Guo’s (zhimeng@psu.edu) office hours: Friday 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM @ Zoom or by appointment
- Canvas: IST 815
Announcements
- 2025-08-25: Welcome to IST 815!
Description
The course covers different topics in information security. Students will learn about fundamentals of information security including cryptography, AI security, physical security, network security, software security.
Grading Policy
Grades will be computed based on the following factors:
- Labs (30%)
- Quizzes (20%)
- Research project (50%)
Final grade cutoff:
- A [93%, 100%]
- A- [90%, 93%)
- B+ [87%, 90%)
- B [83%, 87%)
- B- [80%, 83%)
- C+ [77%, 80%)
- C [70%, 77%)
- D [60%, 70%)
- F [0%, 60%)
Research Projects
Students are required to do a project in this class. The goal of the course project is to provide the students an opportunity to learn about information security. The project should be related to the course content. An expected project consists of
- A novel and sound solution to an interesting problem
- Comprehensive literature review and discussion
- Thorough theoretical/experimental evaluation and comparisons with existing approaches
- A demo of information security in real-world applications.
Late Submission Policy
- Students can submit late with the penalty of 50% deduction for every 24 hours late (up to 2 days).
- After 2 days, no more late submission is allowed.
- Extensions can be granted for special cases (email the instructor)
Tentative Schedule and Material
| Date | Topic | Readings&links | Assignments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 08/26/2025 | Course Information | ||
| 09/02/2025 | Overview of Information Security |
References
There is no required textbook for this course. Some recommended readings are
- Deep Learning (by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville)
- Adversarial Robustness for Machine Learning (By Pin-Yu Chen and Cho-Jui Hsieh )
- Crypto101 (by lvh)
- Computer security: principles and practice, William Stallings, Lawrie Brown, Third Edition
- Foundations of Information Security (by Jason Andress) - ebook available through Penn State library