EDU

This project is addressing the question of why there are few women in the growing cybersecurity profession. One of the first exposures to cybersecurity for young people is often a cybersecurity competition, offered at the high school and college levels. Most of these competitions have a "male" focus, based on military "capture the flag" principles. As a result, very few females attend them.

The goal of this project is to develop a framework for integrating critical infrastructure cyber-physical systems (CPS) into an effective and well established Cyber Defense Competition (CDC) model created at Iowa State University (ISU). The resulting framework will enable others to replicate cyber-physical CDCs providing an avenue for producing more CPS security professionals. Cyber defense competitions across the nation have solidified and enriched student understanding and competency in defending computer and network systems.

The Web browser is one of the most frequently used application by most people to perform common tasks such as shopping, social networking, emailing, banking, finding directions, and research on the Internet. Security threats and attacks targeting browsers or browser-based applications are becoming sophisticated as attackers are constantly developing innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities of browsers and browser-based applications. Researchers, though, are making positive progress in mitigating risks from browsers to defend enterprise systems and consumer devices.

The Web browser is one of the most frequently used application by most people to perform common tasks such as shopping, social networking, emailing, banking, finding directions, and research on the Internet. Security threats and attacks targeting browsers or browser-based applications are becoming sophisticated as attackers are constantly developing innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities of browsers and browser-based applications. Researchers, though, are making positive progress in mitigating risks from browsers to defend enterprise systems and consumer devices.

This project establishes a multimedia-based virtual classroom with a virtual lab teaching assistant for the education of cyber physical system (CPS) security. Such a virtual classroom helps college students in resource-limited rural areas to learn the latest CPS security knowledge via an on-line peer-to-peer learning environment with other students from larger schools.