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Protocol Threat Modelling and Secure Boundaries

Competency Contract​

  • Primary competency: NC-NETWORKS-001
  • Mastery: explain, apply, develop, and evaluate as required by the semester assessment
  • Status: required evidence extension; it does not add a semester or increase the advertised duration

Required Work​

Model assets, actors, trust boundaries, and protocol misuse; reason about TLS and authentication; capture adversarial network evidence; design secure service boundaries and recovery behavior.

Evidence Contract​

  • protocol threat model
  • packet trace
  • authentication failure test
  • least-privilege boundary
  • recovery proof.

Assessment Integration​

  • Project: produce the evidence in the semester repository rather than as detached prose.
  • Checkpoint: show the evidence exists and identify its highest-risk gap.
  • Cumulative review: connect the work to current, previous, and two-semesters-back knowledge.
  • Exam: evaluate a new case and reject an attractive but unsafe or unsupported alternative.
  • Rubric: every required evidence category must pass; strengths cannot average away a missing category.
  • Answer key: calibrate the shape of evidence without prescribing one implementation.

Oral Defense​

Walk one attack path from packet to process and defend the control and residual risk.

AI-Use Declaration​

Record tools and models used, material output accepted, rejected suggestions, and independent verification. Undeclared generated evidence fails the integrity gate.

Reading Route​

Start with the linked semester concepts and labs. Use local books selectively for conceptual depth and current official standards for normative requirements. Stop reading when you can produce and defend the required evidence.