Course in Information Security in Business: Multi-Party Computation

At IIM-C we firmly believe that information is power. In the years to come the need for increased sharing of information will govern the changes in organizational structure. A basic understanding of information systems is thus mandatory. We endeavor to ensure that you drive the e-commerce revolution. These courses not only equip you with software tools but also impart an understanding of the hardware which will help you set design your own database. It's time you started your own dotcom at IIMC.

Course Objectives

To expose the students to the issues of privacy and security of information in computations carried out in business operations performed within an organization, across organizations, between an organization and one or more persons, or among two or more people (B2B, B2C, C2C, etc.) who are separated by time, space and/or culture. To appreciate the threats (opportunities) thrown up due to inappropriate (clever) ways of handling the security issues arising from management of information. To encourage sharing of information by exploiting the preservation of privacy and to encourage cooperation while allowing competition through secure multi-party computation, i.e. joint computations based on the concepts distributed computing, agent based computation and secure computation - cryptography, in situations involving multi-party negotiation, e.g. cooperative supply chain planning, e-market operations such as group buying and reverse auctions.
Course Content

Cryptographic concepts and Secure Multi-party Computation and Distributed Computing;

Privacy Preserving applications, for examples, e-negotiations, e-auctions, e-procurement, supply chain management - cooperative supply chain planning, marketing and sales (e-markets), financial and banking e-transactions, business in digital goods: sale, purchase or rental, privacy preserving data mining, privacy in statistical databases, security in data warehouses, secure web services;

Topics such as Information security risk analysis for business, Mobile and Wireless network security and privacy, and Grid computing.


Pedagogy

Lectures and Case discussions; Case presentation and theme (or, topic) presentation by students, and Project presentations by students.

This is planned to be a highly interactive course with strong student involvement. Case discussions will be an important vehicle to convey ideas of applications of secure multi-party computation to business. Students will be encouraged to study and present some of the cases. Students will also be asked to pick up some theme topic (an emerging topic) in security in business and study the topic. The student (alone or in a team of two) will be required to focus on a specific application and suggest newer ways to solve it using the theme topic. There will be presentations on the theme as well as on its applications in business. Each presentation will be accompanied by Project Reports and Presentation material (PPT) of professional standard.