SY110 Course Policy
Students are responsible for being thoroughly familiar with this document.
Your Instructor reviewed this on the first day of class.
SY110 Mission Statement
Educate each Midshipman about cyber infrastructure and systems, inherent cyber domain vulnerabilities and threats, and appropriate defensive security procedures, thereby enabling them to make principled decisions regarding the potential benefits, consequences, and risks from a proposed use of an information system in the cyber domain.
SY110 Course Goals
The fundamental goal of SY110 is that students acquire:
A principled understanding of the basic physical and virtual architecture of the cyber domain, focusing on: the individual computer and program, the physical components and protocols of a network and the Internet, and the distributed client-server system that is the World Wide Web;
Hands on experience with basic components of the physical and virtual architecture in the cyber domain and the ability to relate that experience to the larger system;
A principled understanding of DoD's Pillars of Cyber Security (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Non-repudiation, Authentication), the inherent vulnerabilities of information systems that endanger these properties, defensive measures to ensure that information systems retain these properties, and offensive measures that can be used to violate these pillars; and
Hands on experience with some basic offensive and defensive practices in the cyber domain, and the ability to relate that experience to new or more sophisticated attacks and defenses.
History of SY110
SY110 is a plebe-year (first year) core course that began in AY2012 (Fall CY2011).
It is not very often that such a fundamental change in the USNA curriculum occurs, so it is important to understand how it came about, and to see how much time, effort and care went into the decision to introduce the course.
SY110 Acknowledgements
Many people had a hand in bringing SY110 to the USNA curriculum.
This link acknowledges many of the people that were an important part of this effort.
We apologize for anyone we've missed.
We are happy to export SY110 curriculum to other organizations (public, private, academic, government, military).
If you have questions about the SY110 Curriculum, please contact the USNA Cyber Science Department.