EDU

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 purpose of the Branching Interactive Graphic Stories for Cybersecurity Education (BIGSCE) project is to determine how a technology for creating branching ("choose-your-own-adventure") comic book stories, called Comic-BEE, can be used to teach middle school students about cybersecurity. BIGSCE is potentially transformative, informing the development of new approaches to teaching and learning cybersecurity: branching graphic stories can incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy, and therefore have the potential to reach a broader and more diverse body of students.

This project addresses the need to train students, researchers, and practitioners on diverse hardware security and trust issues as well as emergent solutions. The primary goal is establishing a set of hardware security courseware and enabling adoption of these courseware through the development of an online Hardware Attack and Countermeasure Evaluation (HACE) Lab.

The proposed project will develop Visualization and Analysis of C Code Security (VACCS) tool to assist students with learning secure code programming. The proposal addresses the critical issue of learning secure coding through the development of a system for analyzing and visualizing C code and associated learning materials. VACCS will utilize static and dynamic program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities and warn programmers about the potential errors in their code.

Cybersecurity education is critical for the development of future cybersecurity professionals, and for protecting IT assets. The advent of new network technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has resulted in a high degree of flexibility in network infrastructure, but at the same time brought new security challenges. Although current research efforts have prompted positive progress in addressing security challenges and opportunities in SDN and NFV, the latest results appear in few educational materials targeting SDN and NFV security.