CETM45 Assignment 1 Task

CETM45 – Cyber Resilience and Incident Response

Module Assignment 1 of 2, Academic Year 2019-2020

Important Information

You are required to submit your work within the bounds of the University Infringement of Assessment Regulations (see your Programme Guide).  Plagiarism, paraphrasing and downloading large amounts of information from external sources, will not be tolerated and will be dealt with severely.  Although you should make full use of any source material, which would normally be an occasional sentence and/or paragraph (referenced) followed by your own critical analysis/evaluation.  You will receive no marks for work that is not your own. Your work may be subject to checks for originality which can include use of an electronic plagiarism detection service. 

Where you are asked to submit an individual piece of work, the work must be entirely your own.  The safety of your assessments is your responsibility.  You must not permit another student access to your work. 

Where referencing is required, unless otherwise stated, the Harvard referencing system must be used (see your Programme Guide). 

Please ensure that you retain a duplicate of your assignment.  We are required to send samples of student work to the external examiners for moderation purposes.  It will also safeguard in the unlikely event of your work going astray. 

The assignment will assess the following Learning Outcomes: 

Knowledge
1. Ability to critically understand the principles of cybersecurity in the design, analysis and validation of secure and resilient software systems.

2. Ability to use, analyse and evaluate procedures, tools and languages required to implement secure and reliable systems.

Skills
4. Competences to critically applying principles and techniques to deal with the complex issues involved in effectively designing and implementing secure systems, whilst identifying and minimising the security risks.

5. Proficiency to apply procedures and methodologies of cybersecurity in information security and secure systems development and analysis, breach and incident response, and critically discuss the challenges facing cybersecurity practitioners and managers.

The research report focuses on resilience and security issues within large companies.

Your Task

In this assignment you are required to produce a critical research report of no more than 4000 words in length. Within this report you will critically review a number of topics on cyber resilience and you will also critically review industry standard software.  Your report must make effective use of literature and be presented with Harvard Referencing.  

The report should have two main sections.  Section One carries 50 marks, Section Two carries 40 marks and a further 10 marks are available for structure and Harvard referencing. 

Section 1 (50 marks) covers learning outcomes K1 and K2. You are required to research and critically evaluate a number of topics that inform the design and implementation of secure and resilient systems. This section will consist of a number of sub-topics (see guidance below) and should be 2500 words in length.  

Your discussion of these topics should be well structed and presented under an appropriate heading.  You should present references to the academic literature in each section.  In your consideration of each topic you should critically evaluate the literature and draw conclusions that are illustrated with examples for each topic.  You may also note the importance of each topic to the development of resilient programs linking this to principles, standards, laws and policies in addition to the potential security flaws within software that provide said service and the importance of implementing the topic to a system/program. It is not enough to regurgitate or summarise material found in literature. 

Section 2 (40 marks) covers learning outcomes S4 and S5 (and will consist of a developmental and critical analysis of Apache Hadoop investigating the security features and the potential flaws prevalent within the system in addition to how these can overcome). 

For section two you are to prepare a developmental, critical analysis of the following system: Apache Hadoop.  You should investigate the security features and the potential flaws prevalent within the system and make recommendations as to how these may be overcome. You should start this section by briefly commenting on the role of Hadoop and who it is aimed at supporting.  Then you should focus on discussing the potential security flaws within Hadoop how they occur and how these can be addressed. Leveraging upon research and, where applicable, providing tools, services and segments of code which address known vulnerabilities and why it’s vital these security issues are resolved.  

Structure and Referencing (10 marks)

A further 10 marks are available for the structure and use of referencing (quality of references and adherence to Harvard Style).   You should make effective used of subheadings and referenced.  A reference list presented must be included at the end of the research paper.  You are to reference relevant conferences, journal articles (between 10 - 20, sources within recent years). The Harvard referencing format was covered in the library sessions. 

You should submit your paper as a PDF file via Canvas by 23:59 on 31/03/2020.