Companion Videos for Introduction to Security and Privacy

Our course “Introduction to Security and Privacy” assumes a fair amount: the terminal, Linux, networks, and a basic idea of what a program does in memory. Students bring very different amounts of this knowledge. Some have never opened a terminal, others use Linux at home. In the first tutorial, one half is lost and the other half is bored. Since the winter semester 2026/27, companion videos let students catch up on what they are missing and skip what they already know. The teaser (under 2 minutes) explains the idea:

Three series

Terminal basics (6 videos) shows how to work in a terminal, log in to a university machine with ssh, copy files, use a key instead of a password, and keep a program running with tmux. The network (8 videos) follows data from your own laptop to a machine at the university: addresses, routing, NAT, ports, VPN and ssh tunnels. Software Security (5 videos) explains what happens in the processor and in memory while a program runs, how a buffer overflow exploits that, and what helps against it.

Each video has a companion page that goes beyond the video. It explains the material again step by step for reading, with the commands to copy and the output you should see on your own machine. Notes for Windows and macOS and a section on common problems help when something does not work as shown. At the end come exercises to try yourself and questions to check your understanding: answer first, then open the model answer and compare.

The narration is in plain English, with captions in English and German. Every command shown in a video ran on a test system first.

How they were made, and reuse

We built the videos with Claude Code, an AI tool that writes and runs program code on its own. Each scene is programmed as a small web page, and narration, music and captions are generated from code. All 19 videos together took about two days, and polishing took a few days more. We decided the content, the order and the scripts, and reviewed every video before it went online. The colophon has the details.

We do not know yet whether the videos actually narrow the gap in the first tutorial. More on the thinking behind them is in the post on uni-mal-anders.de.

If you teach security, networks or systems basics yourself, you may use and adapt the videos and companion pages under CC BY-SA 4.0. We welcome suggestions for further topics.