Course Description from the University Catalog

CS 6985 - Topics in Computer Science
Credits: 1.00 to 3.00
Designed to give students knowledge at the frontier of a rapidly changing field. May be repeated with a change in subject matter toa total of nine hours.
Lecture: 1.00 to 3.00
College: College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Computer Science
Pre-requisites: See hard copy catalog for pre-requisites.

From the course syllabus:
Course description:  This course explores the science and the law relating to the acquisition, analysis, and documentation of digital evidence.  Topics include fourth amendment rights (search and seizure), evidence handling and admissibility, evidence collection from physical media and network traffic, data hiding techniques (e.g., steganography, tunneling), common digital crimes and profiles of perpetrators, court testimony, and report writing.

Course Information

Course Syllabus
Course Page on the UWG CS Course Web (Moodle)

Course Summary

The following topics were covered in this course:
  • Issues related to Security
  • Password Hacking
  • Backdoor Hacking
    • netcat
  • Live Analysis
  • Legal Aspects of Computer Forensics
    • Search and Seizure
  • Trojans
  • File System Analysis
  • Windows Processes
  • Application Level Forensics and Steganography
  • System Forensics
  • E-Mail and Web Forensics
  • Network Forensics
There were also four exams:
  1. Legal Aspects
  2. System Forensics
  3. Network Forensics
  4. Final Exam

Course Assessment

From the syllabus:

Course description
This course explores the science and the law relating to the acquisition, analysis, and documentation of digital evidence.  Topics include fourth amendment rights (search and seizure), evidence handling and admissibility, evidence collection from physical media and network traffic, data hiding techniques (e.g., steganography, tunneling), common digital crimes and profiles of perpetrators, court testimony, and report writing.

Completed Objectives?
Yes.  All of the learning objectives listed above were satisfied in this course.  See the course summary for more details.  I learned a great deal about the topics as they related to forensic and security in computer science.  I found the legal aspects to be particularly interesting due to my pre-law background, but I also learned a great deal from the rest of the course as well.  I believe I may have been at a disadvantage since I had not yet taken systems and network administration and I believe that course should be a prerequisite should this course ever be offered again.  It seemed as if I was playing catch up for much of the course and I might have had a better learning experience had I already taken systems and network administration.


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