The Stanford Software Security Certificate covers the following topics:


Includes security objectives such as authentication, authorization, access control, confidentiality, data integrity, and non-repudiation. Also covers, software design principles including the principles of least privilege, fail-safe stance, and defense-in-depth.


Includes both symmetric encryption and public-key cryptography, discussing how they are used to achieve security goals and build PKI (Public-Key Infrastructure) systems. Also covers, DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, RSA, ECC, MD5, SHA-1, X.509, digital signatures, and all cryptographic primitives necessary to understand PKI. Diffie-Hellman key exchange and man-in-the-middle attacks will also be discussed.


Includes discussion on the threats that worms and hackers present to software and the programming techniques that developers can use to defend against software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, SQL injection, and off-line dictionary attacks. Also covers common mistakes made in using cryptographic libraries and how they can be avoided.