An Innovative Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Education for Protecting Critical Infrastructure

ABSTRACT

The U.S. needs critical human resources to combat growing cybersecurity threats, especially for our nation's critical infrastructure. Fully addressing cybersecurity education for the protection of critical infrastructure, however, requires extending the research and education process beyond traditional computing programs into other engineering disciplines. This capacity building research track is developing an interdisciplinary, cybersecurity education program for engineers that must be aware of critical design issues for addressing cyber secured control systems for electromechanical devices, more effective techniques for the integration of secure software and hardware devices, and the law and policy issues that are essential to the research and development of cybersecurity measures. This project is a collaboration of faculty members from industrial engineering, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and law for the purpose of developing undergraduate and graduate certificate and concentration programs that provide an engineering-oriented education framework for cybersecurity and information assurance courses. The interdisciplinary curriculum builds on the cyber physical research foundation provided by a recent NSF Major Research Instrumentation project at Texas Tech University for developing a real-time simulator for smart grid systems integrated with renewable energy sources, thus providing an educational framework to address security issues at the network level, the system level, and the device level of cyber physical systems. The curriculum consists of an interdisciplinary core that addresses information assurance, cyber physical systems, and law and policy, with multiple tracks that can be tailored to cybersecurity education within a specific engineering discipline. An external advisory board of industry and government collaborators is working with Texas Tech University faculty to provide training and review of curriculum design and development activities. Faculty is also involved in cybersecurity awareness outreach within the university and at the K-12 level.

Award ID: 1241735