Introduction

Objective

• Tried teaching computer security to data scientists
• Had to back up every few minutes to explain underlying concepts
  • "What does it mean to 'mount' a filesystem?"
  • "What does it mean to 'background' a job?"
  • "What is a 'port'?"
• Answer those questions step-by-step so that securing a web service will make sense

What This Is

• Notes and working examples that instructors can use to perform a lesson
• Musical analogy
  • This is the chord changes and melody
  • We expect instructors to create an arrangement and/or improvise while delivering
  • See Teaching Tech Together for background
• Please see the license for terms of use, the Code of Conduct for community standards.

Scope

• Intended audience
  • Ning did a bachelor's degree in economics and now works as a data analyst for the Ministry of Health
  • They are comfortable working with common Unix command-line tools, writing data analysis scripts in Python, and downloading data from the web manually
  • They want to understand what happens when they install a package or run a pipeline in the cloud
  • Their work schedule is unpredictable and highly variable, so they need to be able to learn a bit at a time

Prerequisites

• Unix shell commands covered in this Software Carpentry lesson:
  • pwd; ls; cd; . and ..; rm and rmdir; mkdir; touch; mv; cp; tree; cat; wc; head; tail; less; cut; echo; history; find; grep; zip; man
  • Current working directory; absolute and relative paths; naming files
  • Standard input; standard output; standard error; redirection; pipes
  • * and ? wildcards; shell variable with $ expansion; for loop
• Python for command-line scripting
  • Variables; numbers and strings; lists; dictionaries; for and while loops; if/else; with; defining and calling functions; sys.argv, sys.stdin, and sys.stdout; simple regular expressions.
  • Create a virtual environment with uv; activate it and install packages.

Learning Outcomes

1. Explain what environment variables are and write programs that use them.
2. Create a virtual environment and explain what this does.
3. Create a pyproject.toml file for Python and explain version pinning.
4. Explain what filesystems are (disk partitions, inodes, symbolic links) and explore them with df, ln, and similar commands.
5. Explain what a process is and use commands like ps and kill to manage them.
6. Explain what a job is and use commands like jobs, bg, and fg to manage them.
7. Explain what cron jobs are and how to create them.
8. Explain the difference between a container and a virtual machine.
9. Create and manage Docker images.
10. Explain what ports are and write Python code that uses sockets and HTTP.
11. Explain what certificates are and how they are used to support HTTPS.
12. Explain what key pairs are and how to create and manage them.
13. Explain what IP addresses are and how they are resolved.
14. Explain how traditional password authentication works and describe its weaknesses.

Setup

• Download the latest release
• Unzip the file in a temporary directory to create:
  • ./site/*.*: files and directories used in examples
  • ./src/*.*: shell scripts and Python programs
  • ./out/*.*: expected output for examples