Courses

The core curriculum -- reviewed, refined and validated by professionals in the field --provides the foundation skills you need to lead an information assurance organization. Even our business oriented classes such as economics, statistics, and accounting, are taught from an information systems perspective.

Required Courses (90 units)

Security Electives (30 units)

The MSISPM program aims to provide students with expertise in Information Assurance through a set of well crafted courses in Policy, Risk Management, Security Architectures and Engineering, Privacy & Confidentiality, Cryptography, Information Warfare, CyberCrime, Incident Response, and Information Assurance Technologies.

These courses address the foundations of Information Assurance from a multi-disciplinary perspective including regulatory requirements, organizational and human factors, and economic impacts. Our graduates are able to apply these principles and best practices taught by researchers and practitioners in the industry to secure organizations, people, networks and other information assets by managing the threats and reducing the vulnerabilities in our systems.

General Electives (36-48 units)

A number of courses offered by the MISM Program and the Heinz School will satisfy the general elective requirement.
Students choosing to complete a Masters Thesis will need to complete 36 units of general electives; students choosing to go the Information Project route will need 48 units of general electives to meet graduation requirements

Capstone Experience (24-36 units)

Information Security Project (24 Units)
or
Masters Thesis (36 Units)
Optional Summer Internship (mandatory for SFS students)

Course Exemptions

Several core courses may be exempted either by passing an exemption exam administered by the Heinz School during your orientation program. Exempting a course does not reduce the required number of units you must complete; you must still complete the required 192 units. Exempting a course does, however, free your schedule to take more elective courses of your choosing.

Scholarship for Service Internship Requirement

Students who are participating in the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS) are required by the terms of the scholarship agreement to complete a summer internship with a federal government agency or a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) like CERT, RAND Corp, etc.

The MSISPM program draws faculty from across the university and industry to offer a rich set of courses that provide you with depth in the area of Information Assurance.

Choose 36 units of security electives from the following list, and/or from among those offered by the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Software Engineering Institute, Tepper School of Business and other Carnegie Mellon schools.

Students can enhance their skills and explore other areas of interest through your choice of 36-48 units of general electives. Some students choose to deepen their knowledge in Information Assurance whereas others choose to take courses that intrigue their imagination. Nevertheless, we believe that these courses will provide our graduates with a well-rounded education needed to compete in the global economy.

Courses in the list below are a very small subset of the courses that can be taken to fulfil this requirement. Your advisor or Program Director can talk to you about other courses that fulfil this requirement.