EDU: Collaborative: Enhancing Pervasive and Mobile Computing Security Education With Research Integration

This project will help address the shortage of highly-skilled Cybersecurity professionals by bringing research results on pervasive and mobile computing security into education and by integrating them into existing Cybersecurity curricula. Although the research community is making progress towards effective solutions in mitigating security and privacy threats in pervasive computing, it still needs to find its way to university courses across the nation, especially, in the undergraduate curriculum. With increasingly sophisticated attacks on mobile systems and devices, it is critical to bring research results on pervasive and mobile security into education to prepare the future Cybersecurity workforce. With a goal to fill this gap, the project defines the following objectives: enhancing security education through curriculum development; engaging students through hands-on lab development; improving undergraduate research capabilities through research project design; and building faculty capacity through hands-on workshops. The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program funds proposals that address Cybersecurity from a Trustworthy Computing Systems perspective; a Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences perspective; and proposals focusing entirely on Cybersecurity Education.

This project will strengthen Cybersecurity curricula and build partnership between a metropolitan university with 60 percent of first-generation college students and a historically black university (HBCU). The course and accompanying labs will motivate students to consider a career in Cybersecurity. The joint effort in this collaborative project will increase the number of women and African American Cybersecurity professionals. The topics in pervasive and mobile computing are very practical and the hands-on labs are immersive through the use of mobile devices, emulator tools and virtualization techniques. The course materials will be delivered via several transferable learning objects containing lecture slides, videos, animations, labs and quizzes. This project will also increase the number of teachers capable to teach mobile security through curriculum, academic sharing of materials, and collaborative research opportunities.

Yujian Fu