CyberPaths
Xenia Mountrouidou, V Eldiva Thomas · 2019
The primary purpose of this workshop is to help undergraduate liberal arts colleges integrate cyber security seamlessly into the curriculum with little to no additional investment. We believe Liberal Arts Colleges can provide to the cyber security workforce well-rounded individuals, equipped to tackle new and complex problems. However, liberal arts colleges rarely have the resources needed to provide the hands-on labs critical to attracting students to cyber security classes and for preparing students for the workforce. Our NSF funded project 'CyberPaths" addresses this by devising several active learning labs on topics such as ransomware, authentication, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), and remote network attacks. These labs are implemented on the cloud infrastructure GENI, an NSF funded free academic cloud infrastructure for realistic networking experimentation. We have developed a variety of labs that are suitable for non-CS majors as well as CS upper level courses. In addition, we propose interdisciplinary cyber security modules and multiple paths that can lead to the cyber security professions, starting from the general education courses, moving to an intro to cyber security course, and upper level CS courses. Our goal is to offer solutions to liberal arts institutions with cyber security active learning and introducing cyber security early in the curriculum with low overhead. This workshop will be highly interactive using a combination of hands-on labs and discussions. If you wish to do the hands-on exercises please bring a laptop with a browser and ssh client installed.