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Software Engineering and Security: Lessons Learned Creating a New Course in Security from a Software Engineering Perspective

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Software Engineering Division Technical Session 2

Page Count

10

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41750

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41750

Download Count

470

Paper Authors

biography

Kevin Gary Arizona State University

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Kevin Gary is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) at Arizona State University. He is a founding member of ASU's Software Engineering program, former Program Chair, and current ABET Coordinator of the program. At ASU he has led multiple curricular development efforts in software engineering notably security and agile methods. He is the creator of the Software Enterprise project-centered sequence making up the core of the BS in SE at ASU.

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Abstract

Security is a rising concern for organizations hiring undergraduates out of college in computing disciplines. This is reflected in the emerging prominence of cybersecurity related courses, certificates, and degree programs, and reflected in the most recent curricular standards guidelines. Perspectives on security recognize it as both a system discipline, meaning the inclusion of hardware, software, and networking components, and a cross-cutting skill across the major phases on the software engineering lifecycle (requirements, design, verification & validation, construction, and evolution and maintenance). Our conjecture is that there are many open and available resources for the first perspective (system) but few for the second perspective (software engineering). In this paper we share experiences creating a new junior-level security course in secure software engineering as a required course in an undergraduate accredited software engineering degree program. Specifically, and aligned with the latter perspective, we share the challenges we faced when seeking curricular resources, including open courseware repositories and textbooks, to jump start the development. We reflect on these experiences by providing a map of curricular resources to cross-cutting software engineering lifecycle phases, examining popular open (and usually federally funded) courseware repositories including the SEED project from Syracuse University and the Cybersecurity Labs and Resource Knowledge-base (CLARK) initiative, as well as ad hoc resources.

Gary, K. (2022, August), Software Engineering and Security: Lessons Learned Creating a New Course in Security from a Software Engineering Perspective Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41750

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