2020 BEST PIC I PAPER WINNER - Hands-On Cybersecurity Curriculum Using a Modular Training Kit

Asmit De; Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan; Karthikeyan Nagarajan; Abdullah Ash Saki; Md Mahabubul Alam; Taylor Steven Wood; Matthew Johnson; Manoj Varma Saripalli; Yu Xia; Stephanie Cutler; Swaroop Ghosh; Kathleen M. Hill; Annmarie Ward

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Conference: 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
Location: Virtual Conference
Publication Date: July 26, 2021
Start Date: July 26, 2021
End Date: July 19, 2022
Conference Session: DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: 2020 Best PIC and Zone Papers
Tagged Topic: ASEE Board of Directors
Page Count: 17
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--36541
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/36541
Download Count: 427

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Asmit De Pennsylvania State University

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Asmit De is a PhD Candidate in Computer Engineering at PennState. His research interest is in developing secure hardware and architectures for mitigating system vulnerabilities. Asmit received his B. Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India in 2014. He worked as a Software Engineer in the enterprise mobile security team at Samsung R&D Institute, India from 2014 to 2015. He has also worked as a Design Engineer Intern in the SoC Template team at SiFive Inc. developing security IPs in summer 2019.

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Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan

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Karthikeyan Nagarajan Pennsylvania State University orcid.org/0000-0002-0518-4940

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Abstract

BEST PIC I PAPER WINNER

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 utmost important to prepare a workforce equipped with knowledge of the threat space and existing state-of-the-art solution. 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 is developed on hardware security for Senior undergraduate and graduate students. 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 are also 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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De, A., & Khan, M. N. I., & Nagarajan, K., & Saki, A. A., & Alam, M. M., & Wood, T. S., & Johnson, M., & Saripalli, M. V., & Xia, Y., & Cutler, S., & Ghosh, S., & Hill, K. M., & Ward, A. (2021, July), 2020 BEST PIC I PAPER WINNER - Hands-On Cybersecurity Curriculum Using a Modular Training Kit Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--36541

TY - CPAPER
AB - BEST PIC I PAPER WINNER

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 utmost important to prepare a workforce equipped with knowledge of the threat space and existing state-of-the-art solution. 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 is developed on hardware security for Senior undergraduate and graduate students. 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 are also 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.
AU - Asmit De
AU - Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan
AU - Karthikeyan Nagarajan
AU - Abdullah Ash Saki
AU - Md Mahabubul Alam
AU - Taylor Steven Wood
AU - Matthew Johnson
AU - Manoj Varma Saripalli
AU - Yu Xia
AU - Stephanie Cutler
AU - Swaroop Ghosh
AU - Kathleen M. Hill
AU - Annmarie Ward
CY - Virtual Conference
DA - 2021/07/26
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - 2020 BEST PIC I PAPER WINNER - Hands-On Cybersecurity Curriculum Using a Modular Training Kit
UR - https://peer.asee.org/36541
DO - 10.18260/1-2--36541
ER -