BAS CO Curriculum, Emphasis Areas & Courses

• Operating Systems and Low-Level Programming: Demonstrate a thorough understanding of various operating systems and be able to develop low-level applications with the required complexity and sophistication to implement exploits for discovered vulnerabilities.
• Malware Reverse Engineering: Safely perform static and dynamic analysis of unknown software, including obfuscated malware, to fully understand the software's functionality.
• Offensive Cyber Operations: Explain and demonstrate the phases of offensive cyber operations, what each phase entails, who has the authorities to conduct each phase and how operations are assessed after completion.
• Defensive Cyber Operations: Describe, evaluate and operate a defensive network architecture employing multiple layers of protection using technologies appropriate to meet mission security goals.
• Forensics: Demonstrate and explain how to acquire a forensically sound image, understand user activity, determine the manner in which an operating system or application has been subverted, identify forensic artifacts left by attacks and recover deleted and/or intentionally hidden information.
• Networking: Demonstrate a thorough understanding of how networks work at the infrastructure, network and applications layers; how they transfer data; how network protocols work to enable communication; and how the lower-level network layers support the upper ones.
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Demonstrate understanding of how variability affects outcomes, how to identify anomalous events, how to integrate and differentiate continuous functions of multiple variables and how to solve complex problems using computation and scripting languages.
• Law, Ethics and Policy: Describe and explain the relationship between cyber ethics and law, US and International cyber laws and criminal penalties related to unethical hacking; and apply the notion of gray areas to articulate where the law has not yet caught up to technology innovation.
• Security Principles and Vulnerabilities: Demonstrate and explain the various types of vulnerabilities and their underlying causes and how security principles interrelate and are typically employee to achieve assured solutions; and explain how failures in fundamental security design principles can lead to system vulnerabilities that can be exploited as part of an offensive cyber operation.
• Cyber Threat Intelligence: Describe and demonstrate how knowledge about an adversary's motivation, intentions and methods are collected, analyzed and disseminated to help security personnel and business staff to align resources and protect critical assets within an enterprise architecture.

Combine your highly technical, hands-on Cyber Operations courses with a strong foundation in law, strategy and policy relevant to cyber professionals.

BAS CO Law & Policy emphasis students are also eligible for the Master of Legal Studies accelerated master's program. Learn more.

Career Options: Chief Information Security Officers, Cybersecurity Analysts, Cybersecurity Compliance Officer, Cyber Advisor, Policy Analyst, Executive/Legislative Staff, Federal/State Law Enforcement

Year 1 | Fall

Year 2 | Fall

Year 3 | Fall

Year 4 | Fall

Foundations

Specific unit requirements may vary based on placement and/or prior college-level coursework:

• First-year English or equivalent
• MATH Foundation (MATH 112 recommended)
• Second-semester second language proficiency

General Education

• Introduction to General Education (1 unit)
• Exploring Perspectives Courses (12 units, including at least one course from each domain: Artist, Humanist, Natural Scientist, Social Scientist)
• Building Connections Courses (9 units)
• General Education Capstone (1 unit)

Supporting Coursework

• MATH 112 or MATH 122A/B
• CYBV 300 (prerequisite: MATH 112)
• CYBV 310
• CYBV 311
• CYBV 312

Learn More About U of A General Education Requirements