Courses & research | Cyber Security

During your Master’s in Computer Science, you will earn a total of 120 EC within two years. In addition to the mandatory course Computer Ethics, you will take four mandatory specialisation courses, advanced specialisation coursers, and elective courses. As part of the electives, you can also do an optional internship, take courses from other specialisations and programmes, or study abroad. You will complete your Master's by writing your master’s thesis.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), which is widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work.

Structure

Year 1 and 2	Number of EC
Mandatory course For all Master’s in Computer Science students.	5 EC	Computer Ethics
Core specialisation courses For all students in Cyber Security.	20 EC	Internet Security Software Security Security and Cryptography Cyber Risk Management
Advanced specialisation courses You should choose four of the advanced specialisation courses to deepen your expertise on a topic of your interest within the specialisation.	At least 20 EC	Examples of advanced specialisation courses are: Blockchain and Distributed Ledger E-Law Secure Cloud Computing Security Services for IoT
Profiling space	25 EC	Some examples of how you can fill up your profiling space: Electives from other CS specialisations or related Master’s (EE, EMSYS, BIT, ITECH, and AM) Internship Exchange programme
Individual final year project	40 EC	Research Topics (10 EC) Final project (30 EC)
Total EC	120 EC

or meet online with a student and gain first-hand experience!

Internship

In the second year of your Master’s in Computer Science, you can choose to do an internship. This way, you can apply the knowledge and skills you have acquired during your studies at an accounting firm, a government agency, a bank, or an IT security company in the Netherlands or abroad. The EEMCS faculty at the University of Twente has connections with a large number of research institutes, corporations, and start-ups where you can do your internship project.

Previous students have done internships at:

Software development companies such as Cofano Software Solutions BV and Juniper Networks
Companies such as NetScout that provide cybersecurity and business intelligence solutions
International IT services and consulting companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, and KMPG

Master's thesis

You will complete your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis. You can either do an external master’s thesis at a company or at another higher education institute or conduct research within one of the EEMCS research groups, especially at Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) or Semantics, Cybersecurity, and Services (SCS). You can, for example, investigate how personal data is collected through the use of cookies on a smart TV and come up with a technique that blocks the collection of data without disconnecting from the internet. Or you can focus your master’s thesis on developing ontologies to design and implement security protocols that prevent data breaches. Also, you can examine cryptographic techniques and protocols used in remote attestation, a mechanism that proves the identity of a software and its trustworthiness.

As part of your master’s thesis, you can undertake a research project such as:

Understanding the firmware of a secure chip deployed on a recent Android smartphone and scanning it for vulnerabilities including the reporting of an unknown bug.
Exploring options to apply cryptographic algorithms to the domain name service of today’s internet in order to protect it against tomorrow’s attacks by quantum computers.
Evaluating the effect of a revised European directive that strived to improve the security of e-payment systems on different players in the financial sector.

Career perspectives