← Back to catalogue

Level 2 · M.Sc

MSc Advanced Offensive Security & Adversary Research

Security · Live · v0

Doctoral adversary research, CTF-style and detection-first — exploitation science and countermeasure design.

Path type

Security

Requirements

MSc Blackhat Offensive Security

Enrollment

€39.90

Deadline

Next cohort starts 2027-09-06 (AY 2027/28)

Length

~1 year · 42 phases

Language

English · Español

Content freshness

Curriculum updated 2026-08-24 · content rev 8d5ac490

Cortex Credits (CC)

126 CC · 421 CC across all tiers of this programme
What are Cortex Credits?

Syllabus

View the phase syllabus

0. From operator to adversary researcher
1. Adversary emulation & threat-informed defense
2. The detection-evasion arms race framed formally
3. Measurement discipline for offense
4. Telemetry from the attacker's side
5. Reproducible offensive research
6. Reading the offensive-security literature
7. Scan-detection modeling & evasive scanning
8. Firewall & IDS evasion research
9. Traffic-analysis resistance
10. Protocol-level enumeration at depth
11. Living-off-the-land reconnaissance
12. Recon-research capstone
13. Web & service exploitation at research depth
14. Fuzzing & symbolic execution for discovery
15. Credential-attack research
16. Automated exploitation frameworks dissected
17. Payload & delivery research
18. Access-research capstone
19. Machine-code & instruction-level analysis
20. Privilege rings in practice: ring 3 ↔ ring 0
21. CPU modes & mode-transition abuse
22. Extended CPU flags & mitigation bypass
23. Ring -1: hypervisor & virtualization internals from the attacker's seat
24. Virtualization bypass / VM-escape concepts
25. Anti-VM, hypervisor-detection & sandbox evasion
26. Low-level capstone — ring -2 & the trust boundary
27. Userland rootkit research
28. Kernel-level hiding & eBPF for offense
29. Persistence design space
30. Anti-forensics research
31. Capture & credential-harvesting internals
32. Covert channels & exfil research
33. Post-ex research capstone
34. Detection engineering from the adversary's seat
35. NSM evasion research
36. Host-telemetry evasion
37. Timing & operational-security modeling
38. Adversarial ML for detection evasion
39. The evasion–detection frontier
40. Co-evolution capstone
41. Threat-actor emulation methodology

Syllabus →

Enrolment prerequisites

• A verified account and admissions-committee approval.
• Recommended path: MSc Blackhat Offensive Security (advisory, not blocking).