CS 340 · Year 3 · Semester 2 · 3 credits · Computer Science

Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection

Safeguarding actuarial intelligence: from mathematical privacy guarantees and cryptographic foundations to regulatory compliance and cyber resilience.

Full practice exam · 30 Q · 120 min

Season 1 · 8 episodes

Perimeter of Trust

When an impending regulatory audit coincides with Lumina Life's ambitious plan to pool chronic-disease health data across competing carriers, newly appointed actuarial engineer Maya Lin must secure their pricing pipeline against catastrophic cyber attacks, privacy leaks, and statutory ruin before the board votes to decommission the project.

Protagonist · Maya Lin, Lead Actuarial Systems Engineer and Data Protection Technical Delegate at Lumina Life & Health

Setting · Lumina Life & Health headquarters in Chicago, spanning glass-walled actuarial trading floors, secure cloud data enclaves, and tense executive boardrooms

Stakes · A thirty-million-dollar statutory fine under health privacy laws, the immediate revocation of Lumina's underwriting license, and the catastrophic exposure of four hundred thousand vulnerable policyholders' medical histories.

Pick an episode

Episodes

Season finale: Maya successfully thwarts an active supply-chain exploit during a live audit, preserves the privacy of the multi-carrier consortium model via differential privacy and secure aggregation, and proves to the board and regulators that Lumina's cyber reserves and technical perimeters are mathematically unbreakable.

From the lecturer: Welcome to CS 340. Modern actuaries handle some of society's most sensitive information: granular health histories, telematics traces, biometric markers, and proprietary financial ledgers. A vulnerability in an actuarial data pipeline or pricing engine does not merely breach software; it exposes policyholders to catastrophic identity theft and insurers to solvency-threatening regulatory penalties. When watching these lectures, keep both an engineering terminal and a computation notebook beside you. You will derive privacy loss bounds on paper and implement cryptosystems and Laplace noise addition in code. Although this course does not sit directly on an SOA or CAS preliminary exam syllabus, it is foundational to modern actuarial professional practice, directly supporting compliance with Actuarial Standards of Practice on data quality and communications (such as ASOP No. 23 and ASOP No. 41) alongside international privacy statutes like GDPR, HIPAA, and state insurance data security model laws. Approach each threat model not as an abstract checklist, but as a formal verification of your actuarial infrastructure's integrity.

Cold open

Maya sits in front of a flashing terminal at six in the morning as an automated alert flags an unauthenticated query pulling three hundred thousand unencrypted mortality records across Lumina's legacy staging server. The state insurance commissioner's audit team arrives in exactly seventy-two hours, and the engineering team has no map of where actuarial data crosses untrusted boundaries.

preparing lecture…

Transcript

Construct Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) and identify trust boundaries across actuarial systems.
Deconstruct pipeline vulnerabilities using the STRIDE framework and Attack Trees.
Quantify cyber exposure using DREAD and the FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) framework.
Align threat mitigations with ASOP 23 (Data Quality) and ASOP 56 (Modeling).