Division of Graduate Education (DGE)

A number of researchers have advocated that secure programming instruction be integrated across a computing curriculum but there have been relatively few efforts examining how to successfully do so. The proposed research expands upon a previous project by focusing on advanced computing students and courses. The proposed activities include expanding ESIDE tool implementation to support a broader range of security guidelines and code, providing increased contextualization of the instructional materials within the tool, and developing materials and practices for faculty adopting the tool.

Peer-review is a well-known process by which peers evaluate one another's work. In educational settings, peer review involves students evaluating the work of classmates. Peer evaluations can serve many educational purposes: they foster comprehension skills (as students read the work of others), encourage self-assessment and meta-reflection (as students contrast their solutions to others'), demand synthesis of comments from multiple perspectives (as students combine feedback from multiple reviews), and develop professional skills around giving and receiving critique from colleagues.

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.

This project will help motivate students early to pursue Cybersecurity careers by providing capture-the-flag (CTF) Cybersecurity contest that is scalable, effective, and approachable for a large and diverse group of students. This project will enhance PicoCTF 2013 organized by the Principal Investigator (PI) Brumley with more than 10,000 participating students from over 950 schools, making it the largest Cybersecurity competition ever held.

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.