Project Seminar for Master Programs - CS/ITSE/DH/CybSec/DE/SSE

Recent advances in big data and artificial intelligence have led to many significant and substantial changes in today's digital landscape. The penetration of these emerging technologies into cybersecurity, and more specifically into enterprise cyber defense, is highly anticipated, but unfortunately still very limited at the moment. This seminar aims to review the state of the art of Enterprise Security Operation Centers (SOC), teach and train essential knowledge and skills for various phases/roles in the SOC, and explore the possibilities of leveraging emerging technologies towards an advanced and automated SOC.

Important Notices:

• Due to the limit of capacity, we can only offer max. 10 positions for this course.If you have the interest, please write an email NOW to feng.cheng AT hpi.de (First Come, First Served)
• The introductionary session is scheduled on April 13, 2026 in Room P-E.12 (HPI Campus II).

Requirements

• Knowledge and skill on security of applications, OS, networking.
• You have known or the interests to know what the following terms mean:
  • IDS, SOC, MDR, SIEM, SOAR, EDR, NDR, XDR, etc.
  • Splunk, Elastic, CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, etc
  • CTI, NVD, CVE, CPE, etc.

Further Readings

• Awsome SOC
• The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0
• The MITRE ATT&CK® Matrix for Entperprise
• Agentic Security Hub
• ...

Grading

The final evaluation will be based on: report, presentation, design, implementation, participation in the seminar.

• Presentations & demonstrations (PoC Implementations): 3 times (80%) => Prüfungstermin: 18.05.2026
• Technical report (20%)
• Your active participation, creative/innovative ideas, or successful implementations will be appreciated with bonus points.
• The above-mentioned evaluation principles are only for reference and  subject to change. The concrete evaluation may slightly differ from team to team depending on the selected topic(s) and other relevant factors.

Important Dates (last updates on 20.05.2026)

The seminar will start right on the first day of SS2026. Regular meeting will be held every week or upon request.

• 13.04.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
  • Introductory session
• 20.04.-18.05.2026: Phase I
  • 20.04.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Subscription Deadline (by Studienreferat)
    • Tutorial Session 1: SOC 201
    • Team building & Topics Assignment (per Email)
  • 27.04.2026: NO onsite Session
  • 04.05.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Tutorial Session 2
  • 11.05.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Tutorial Session 3
  • 18.05.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Joint presentation session (check-point 1 <= Prüfungstermin)
• 18.05.-16.06.2025: Phase II
  • 15.06.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Joint presentation session (check point 2)
• 15.06.-13.07.2026: Phase III
  • 13.07.2026 13:30pm, P-E.12
    • Joint presentation session (Final)
    • Gather-Together BBQ
• Notes:
  • This is only a preliminary schedule and is subject to change (most likely there will be changes ;-) ).
  • The detailed plan, including milestones and timelines, will be available in the introductory session.
  • This page will not be updated after the team building. Further information will be then available for the course participants on the internal space on HPI-Gitlab.

Contacts

• Feng Cheng (O1-E.07, 0331-5509-519)
• Pejman Najafi (O1-E.06, 0331-5509-3959)