Hands-on Cybersecurity Curriculum Using a Modular Training Kit
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual On line
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2020
- Start Date
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June 22, 2020
- End Date
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June 26, 2021
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Electrical and Computer
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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16
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--34719
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/34719
- Download Count
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1445
Paper Authors
Asmit De Pennsylvania State University
Asmit De is a PhD Candidate in Computer Engineering at PennState. His research interest is in developing secure hardware and architectures for mitigating system vulnerabilities. Asmit received his B. Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India in 2014. He worked as a Software Engineer in the enterprise mobile security team at Samsung R&D Institute, India from 2014 to 2015. He has also worked as a Design Engineer Intern in the SoC Template team at SiFive Inc. developing security IPs in summer 2019.
Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan Pennsylvania State University
Nasim is a final year Doctorate student. His research interest is hardware security.
Karthikeyan Nagarajan
Pennsylvania State University
orcid.org/0000-0002-0518-4940
Karthikeyan is a second-year doctoral student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), under the advisement of Dr. Swaroop Ghosh. Karthikeyan received his Bachelors (’15) and Masters (’17) from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Before starting his Ph.D., Karthikeyan was a Technology Analyst at the firm GrowthPilot in Atlanta and has also worked as a Systems Solutions Intern at Samsung Semiconductor in San Jose. His research interests include hardware security and low-power circuit design. Currently, he is exploring the security and privacy aspects of emerging non-volatile memories like STTRAM, MRAM and RRAM, and their cryptographic applications. He is a student member of IEEE.
Abdullah Ash Saki Pennsylvania State University
Mahabubul Alam Pennsylvania State University
Mahabubul Alam received his B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 2015. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He was an ASIC Physical Design Engineer with PrimeSilicon Technologies. He was an Intern with Qualcomm Flarion Technologies in 2018. His current research interests include quantum circuit noise resilience, optimization techniques/design automation, and hardware security.
Taylor Steven Wood
Pennsylvania State University
orcid.org/0000-0001-8291-8621
Taylor received his B.S. degree in Physics from Brigham Young University, after which he worked for 5 years as a semiconductor engineer for Micron Technology in Boise, ID, specializing in numerical and computational data analysis. During this time, he also volunteered extensively with the educational arm of the Micron Foundation, bringing inquiry-based STEM outreach lessons to K-12 classrooms throughout the Boise area and serving as a career mentor to high school students interested in pursuing engineering as a career. Taylor’s role at CSATS focused on interfacing with science and engineering research faculty to develop and implement K-12 teacher professional development. Currently, Taylor is pursuing a doctorate degree in Materials Science and Engineering and Penn State University.
Matthew Johnson
Pennsylvania State University
orcid.org/0000-0002-6987-2670
Matt is an Assistant Professor with the Center for Science and the Schools in the College of Education at Penn State University. His research interests focus on how teachers learn about epistemic practices of engineers through in-service teacher professional development programs and how they provide opportunities for students to engage in them to learn disciplinary content.
Manoj Varma Saripalli Pennsylvania State University
Yu Xia Pennsylvania State University
Yu Xia is a doctoral candidate in Learning, Design, and Technology program in College of Education and research assistant in Leonhard Center for Enhancement of Engineering Education in College of Engineering at Penn State. She is currently doing research of collaborative learning in various learning contexts.
Stephanie Cutler Pennsylvania State University
Stephanie Cutler has a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her dissertation explored faculty adoption of research-based instructional strategies in the statics classroom. Currently, Dr. Cutler works as an assessment and instructional support specialist with the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education at Penn State. She aids in the educational assessment of faculty-led projects while also supporting instructors to improve their teaching in the classroom. Previously, Dr. Cutler worked as the research specialist with the Rothwell Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence Worldwide Campus (CTLE - W) for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Swaroop Ghosh Pennsylvania State University
Swaroop Ghosh received the B.E. (Hons.) from IIT, Roorkee, India, the M.S. degree from the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette. He is an assistant Professor at Penn State University. Earlier, he was with the faculty of University of South Florida. Prior to that, he was a Senior Research and Development Engineer in Advanced Design, Intel Corp. At Intel, his research was focused on low power and robust embedded memory design in scaled technologies. His research interests include low-power circuits, hardware security, quantum computing and digital testing for nanometer technologies.
Dr. Ghosh served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions On Computer-Aided Design (2019-) and IEEE Transactions On Circuits and Systems I (2014-2015) and as Senior Editorial Board member of IEEE Journal of Emerging Topics on Circuits and Systems (JETCAS) (2016-2018). He served as Guest Editor of the IEEE JETCAS (2015-2016) and IEEE Transactions On VLSI Systems (2018-2019). He has also served in the technical program committees of ACM/IEEE conferences such as, DAC, ICCAD, CICC, DATE, ISLPED, GLSVLSI, Nanoarch and ISQED. He served as Program Chair of ISQED (2019) and DAC Ph.D. Forum (2016) and track (co)-Chair of CICC (2017-2019), ISLPED (2017-2018) and ISQED (2016-2017).
Dr. Ghosh is a recipient of Intel Technology and Manufacturing Group Excellence Award in 2009, Intel Divisional Award in 2011, Intel Departmental Awards in 2011 and 2012, USF Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2015, College of Engineering Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2015, DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) in 2015, ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2016, YFA Director’s Fellowship in 2017, Monkowsky Career Development Award in 2018, Lutron Spira Teaching Excellence Award in 2018 and Dean's Certificate of Excellence in 2019. He is a Senior member of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and, Associate member of Sigma Xi. He serves as a Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a 3 year term (2019-2022).
Kathleen M. Hill Pennsylvania State University
Annmarie Ward
Abstract
There is an exponential growth in the number of cyber-attack incidents resulting in significant financial loss and national security concerns. Secure cyberspace has been designated as one of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges in engineering. Broadly, the security threats are targeted on software programs, operating system and network with the intention to launch confidentiality, integrity and availability violations. Existing undergraduate and graduate-level cybersecurity education curriculum rely primarily on didactic teaching methods with little focus on student centered, inquiry-based teaching, known to improve student learning. With growing number of security incidents taking place, it is utmost important to prepare a workforce equipped with knowledge of the threat space and existing state-of-the-art solution. Such comprehensive understanding is only possible by a dedicated hands-on course on cybersecurity where students can learn the key concepts by editing the hardware, software and OS, and, network policies. Unfortunately, such extensive and deep flexibilities are not provided in current cybersecurity curriculum.
In this paper, we introduce a hands-on and modular self-learning Cybersecurity Training (CST) Kit to advance cybersecurity education. Students can promptly apply newly acquired knowledge on the CST Kit as part of the learning process. This Kit accompanies Do-It-Yourself (DIY) training modules that is used to model and investigate cybersecurity issues and their prevention to all levels of the cybersecurity workforce, including undergraduate and graduate students and K-12 science and technology teachers. The Kit also covers various aspects of cybersecurity issues including, hardware, software, operating system and network security. A coursework is developed on hardware security for Senior undergraduate and graduate students. A preliminary survey conducted among students who were introduced to the modular board to implement hardware security threats such as, side-channel attack shows an 120% improvement in their understanding after the CST Kit based activities. The components of the CST Kit are also used in a 4-day summer workshop for K-12 teachers. Teachers took pre- and post- concept inventories to assess their learning of content throughout the workshop and the results indicated improvement of 58%. These assessments focused on vulnerabilities and specific types of attacks, system security, data transmission and encryption, permutations and combinatorics, and binary numbers.
De, A., & Khan, M. N. I., & Nagarajan, K., & Saki, A. A., & Alam, M., & Wood, T. S., & Johnson, M., & Saripalli, M. V., & Xia, Y., & Cutler, S., & Ghosh, S., & Hill, K. M., & Ward, A. (2020, June), Hands-on Cybersecurity Curriculum Using a Modular Training Kit Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34719
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