TY - JOUR
T1 - Hands-On Cybersecurity Curriculum using a Modular Training Kit
AU - De, Asmit
AU - Khan, Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz
AU - Nagarajan, Karthikeyan
AU - Saki, Abdullah Ash
AU - Alam, Mahabubul
AU - Wood, Taylor Steven
AU - Johnson, Matthew
AU - Saripalli, Manoj Varma
AU - Xia, Yu
AU - Cutler, Stephanie
AU - Ghosh, Swaroop
AU - Hill, Kathleen M.
AU - Ward, Annmarie
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) [DGE 1723687, 1821766, CNS 1722557, 1801534; CCF 1718474] and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) [2847.001, 2727.001].
Funding Information:
Dr. Ghosh is a recipient of Intel Technology and Manufacturing Group Excellence Award in 2009, Intel Divisional Award in 2011, Intel Departmental Awards in 2011 and 2012, USF Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2015, College of Engineering Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2015, DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) in 2015, ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2016, YFA Director’s Fellowship in 2017, Monkowsky Career Development Award in 2018, Lutron Spira Teaching Excellence Award in 2018 and Dean’s Certificate of Excellence in 2019. He is a Senior member of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and, Associate member of Sigma Xi. He serves as a Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a 3 year term (2019-2022).
Publisher Copyright:
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2020
PY - 2021/7/26
Y1 - 2021/7/26
N2 - There is an exponential growth in the number of cyber-attack incidents resulting in significant financial loss and national security concerns. Secure cyberspace has been designated as one of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges in engineering. Broadly, the security threats are targeted on software programs, operating system and network with the intention to launch confidentiality, integrity and availability violations. Existing undergraduate and graduate-level cybersecurity education curriculum rely primarily on didactic teaching methods with little focus on student centered, inquiry-based teaching, known to improve student learning. With growing number of security incidents taking place, it is of utmost importance to prepare a workforce equipped with knowledge of the threat space and existing state-of-the-art solutions. Such comprehensive understanding is only possible by a dedicated hands-on course on cybersecurity where students can learn the key concepts by editing the hardware, software and OS, and, network policies. Unfortunately, such extensive and deep flexibilities are not provided in current cybersecurity curriculum. In this paper, we introduce a hands-on and modular self-learning Cybersecurity Training (CST) Kit to advance cybersecurity education. Students can promptly apply newly acquired knowledge on the CST Kit as part of the learning process. This Kit accompanies Do-It-Yourself (DIY) training modules that is used to model and investigate cybersecurity issues and their prevention to all levels of the cybersecurity workforce, including undergraduate and graduate students and K-12 science and technology teachers. The Kit also covers various aspects of cybersecurity issues including, hardware, software, operating system and network security. A coursework has been developed on hardware security for senior undergraduate and graduate students using the Kit. A preliminary survey conducted among students who were introduced to the modular board to implement hardware security threats such as, side-channel attack shows an 120% improvement in their understanding after the CST Kit based activities. The components of the CST Kit have also been used in a 4-day summer workshop for K-12 teachers. Teachers took pre- and post- concept inventories to assess their learning of content throughout the workshop and the results indicated improvement of 58%. These assessments focused on vulnerabilities and specific types of attacks, system security, data transmission and encryption, permutations and combinatorics, and binary numbers.
AB - There is an exponential growth in the number of cyber-attack incidents resulting in significant financial loss and national security concerns. Secure cyberspace has been designated as one of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges in engineering. Broadly, the security threats are targeted on software programs, operating system and network with the intention to launch confidentiality, integrity and availability violations. Existing undergraduate and graduate-level cybersecurity education curriculum rely primarily on didactic teaching methods with little focus on student centered, inquiry-based teaching, known to improve student learning. With growing number of security incidents taking place, it is of utmost importance to prepare a workforce equipped with knowledge of the threat space and existing state-of-the-art solutions. Such comprehensive understanding is only possible by a dedicated hands-on course on cybersecurity where students can learn the key concepts by editing the hardware, software and OS, and, network policies. Unfortunately, such extensive and deep flexibilities are not provided in current cybersecurity curriculum. In this paper, we introduce a hands-on and modular self-learning Cybersecurity Training (CST) Kit to advance cybersecurity education. Students can promptly apply newly acquired knowledge on the CST Kit as part of the learning process. This Kit accompanies Do-It-Yourself (DIY) training modules that is used to model and investigate cybersecurity issues and their prevention to all levels of the cybersecurity workforce, including undergraduate and graduate students and K-12 science and technology teachers. The Kit also covers various aspects of cybersecurity issues including, hardware, software, operating system and network security. A coursework has been developed on hardware security for senior undergraduate and graduate students using the Kit. A preliminary survey conducted among students who were introduced to the modular board to implement hardware security threats such as, side-channel attack shows an 120% improvement in their understanding after the CST Kit based activities. The components of the CST Kit have also been used in a 4-day summer workshop for K-12 teachers. Teachers took pre- and post- concept inventories to assess their learning of content throughout the workshop and the results indicated improvement of 58%. These assessments focused on vulnerabilities and specific types of attacks, system security, data transmission and encryption, permutations and combinatorics, and binary numbers.
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85124540738
SN - 2153-5965
JO - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings
JF - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings
T2 - 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference, ASEE 2021
Y2 - 26 July 2021 through 29 July 2021
ER -