Curriculum
10 modules, roughly 16 hours of contact time, ordered so each one depends only on the ones before it. Every module is the same four things: a lesson that explains the technique, the tools that perform it, real challenges to practise on, and a checkpoint you can actually grade.
Teaching this? The instructor page has the module outlines, the checkpoints, and the paragraph your IT department will ask for.
- Foundation60 min5 tools52 challenges
1. Recognising encodings
Tell Base64 from hex from Base32 from binary on sight, peel layered encodings, and learn why an encoding is not encryption.
Open module - Foundation90 min4 tools23 challenges
2. Classical ciphers and frequency analysis
Break Caesar, Vigenere, and arbitrary substitution using letter statistics - and learn why statistics beat guessing.
Open module - Foundation60 min4 tools13 challenges
3. Hashes, identification and cracking
Identify a digest by shape, understand why hashing is one-way, and learn where wordlist cracking works and where it is a trap.
Open module - Core90 min3 tools9 challenges
4. XOR and the cost of reusing a key
Break single-byte and repeating-key XOR, then recover both plaintexts from a reused one-time pad by crib dragging.
Open module - Core120 min5 tools23 challenges
5. RSA and the parameters that break it
Work the RSA decision tree - small modulus, close primes, tiny exponent, shared modulus - and learn to read a key for its weakness.
Open module - Core120 min6 tools36 challenges
6. Web attacks and session tokens
Read and forge JWTs and Flask sessions, find content nobody linked to, and probe for injection with detection payloads.
Open module - Core90 min6 tools34 challenges
7. File forensics and carving
Identify files by their bytes, find data appended past a format’s end marker, and pull evidence out of images and documents.
Open module - Core90 min4 tools29 challenges
8. Steganography
Sweep an image, audio file, or paragraph for hidden data across the whole technique space rather than guessing one method.
Open module - Advanced90 min4 tools17 challenges
9. Network forensics
Triage a packet capture: find the one conversation that matters, extract transferred files, and spot exfiltration over DNS.
Open module - Advanced150 min6 tools51 challenges
10. Binary exploitation
Read a binary’s protections, find an overflow offset in one crash, and build a ROP chain when the stack is not executable.
Open module