Discussion of Integrating Hands-on Cybersecurity Exercises into the Curriculum in 2019
RICHARD S. WEISS, Jens Mache, Blair Taylor, Siddharth Kaza, Ankur Chattopadhyay · 2019
The critical shortage of cyber security professionals remains an unsolved problem. We need to greatly expand the community in order to meet the increasing demand. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years. As faculty we need to choose those that we can best integrate into our courses. As a community, we can think about how to create a more unified environment to contribute to each other's projects. We would like to bring together new and experienced faculty to build community and engage in this work. We have set up a dedicated Facebook to allow us to work together outside of SIGCSE events. During the BoF, we will encourage participants to sign up for the closed group, and we will ask the questions, 'What do you want from this learning community? What exercises have you heard about or tried?" One benefit of having a learning community is that it will be easier to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts (NSA's National Cybersecurity Curriculum Program), including our own (e.g. Security Injections, Security Knitting Kit, EDURange and UWGB GenCyber). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. We will discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses.