Security and Privacy

• Computer security involves protecting computer-related assets from unauthorized actions and their consequences, which includes:

  • prevention of unauthorized actions
  • detecting unauthorized actions
  • mitigating effects of attacks when they (inevitably) occur
  • recovery from attacks

• Cybersecurity is often used interchangeably with computer security. Often cybersecurity is IT-focused and relates to protecting network-connected assets, identifying break-ins, and recovering from break-ins. Computer security is used more often in a CS/academic context. It often encompasses a broader range of activities, such as developing secure software, finding and patching software vulnerabilities, reverse engineering code, developing new forms of cryptography and new applications of cryptography.

• Privacy refers to protecting personally sensitive information and controlling how it is shared. This affects any application that collects personal data (e.g. health information, email, facial recognition, phone location, browser history). It also has numerous social impacts, such as ads tracking you online, police departments purchasing your phone location, mass surveillance with cameras and facial recognition, etc. As a result there are a variety of attempts to create privacy legislation, such as GDPR and the California Conusmer Privacy Act. Simultaenously, several nations are advocating for laws that provide governments a “backdoor” to decrypt any encrypted communications, such as wWhatsApp messages.

• Computer security and privacy are often intertwined and hard to distinguish. For example, if I use software that encrypts my email so that nobody can read it except me and my friend, does that mean I’m focused on security (preventing an adversary from reading my emails) or privacy (preventing Google from reading my email to use it for ads or AI training)?

• A security mindset requires thinking carefully about security throughout a software project you are working on

Discussion

• What do you hope to get from this class?
• How has computer security affected your life so far?
• How will computer security affect your life in the future?
• Is there any way in which you wish you had more privacy online?