EDU

The goal of this project is to develop a lightweight infrastructure for supporting hands-on network security education (NSE) and a compelling set of exercises that rely on the infrastructure, covering the three basic aspects of the security: attack, analysis, and defense. Historically, building realistic Cybersecurity exercises has been both a laborious and resource-intensive task.

Information security remains a persistent and growing problem in the United States due to ever-progressing reliance on information technologies and systems to provide critical services and enable society's contemporary way of life. The economics of computing favor performance and functionality over security and may continue to do so for some time. This environment is created by graduates of education programs, programs which can be argued to be lacking in emphasis on security impacts associated with this new information age.

Building on our previous research and educational work in online privacy, this project proposes to develop a Teacher's Kit that supports high school educators and undergraduate instructors in teaching fundamental principles and best practices for online behavior to protect privacy. The proposal plans to develop classroom-ready teaching modules to teach young people why and how to protect their privacy online, and a Teacher's Guide with background information, suggested lesson plans, and guidance on how to employ the modules in the classroom.

The objective of this project is to revitalize cyber security education and research by introducing competitive aspects into their current lifecycles. The project will create and deploy light-weight, online and diverse Class Capture-The-Flag (CCTF) exercises on the DeterLab testbed. The competitions will require only modest preparation and students will engage in competitions remotely, at any time convenient for both teams. The competitions will cover a broad range of security topics, such as infrastructure threats and defenses, denial-of-service, botnet detection and infiltration, etc.

The objective of this project is to create a virtual laboratory for hardware security lab exercises. The lab exercises are based on a hands-on 'hardware hacking' course where students can work on specialized hardware to try out various hardware-based attacks. These lab activities include modules on side channel power analysis attacks, electromagnetic keyboard logging, counterfeit integrated circuit detection, and hardware Trojan attacks.