Identifying Security Vulnerabilities Coursera

Overview

This Identifying Security Vulnerabilities course offered by Coursera in partnership with UC Davis introduces the concepts of threat modeling and cryptography, enabling learners to create threat models and critically evaluate those developed by others. 

It also covers the basics of applying cryptography, including encryption and secure hashing. The course explains how attackers exploit application vulnerabilities through improper handling of user-controlled data and provides a foundational understanding of injection vulnerabilities in web applications, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and command injection.

Features

The course also covers application authentication and session management, highlighting authentication as a core component of secure web applications and session management as the mechanism for maintaining the authenticated state of user requests. It addresses sensitive data exposure issues and methods for protecting customer data, including best practices for securely storing password-related information rather than plaintext passwords. 

A coding assignment provides practical experience with these mechanisms. The course also explores methods for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities, and includes hands-on exercises involving the exploitation of two vulnerabilities in a deliberately insecure web application, WebGoat.