Cybersecurity Program Accreditation
Rajendra K. Raj, Vijay Anand, David S. Gibson, Siddharth Kaza, Andrew T. Phillips · 2019
The Curricular Guidelines for Post-Secondary Degree Programs in Cybersecurity (CSEC 2017) released by the Joint Task Force of the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, AIS and IFIP have begun to define the academic field of cybersecurity. Increasing numbers of institutions are now offering full-fledged undergraduate cybersecurity degree programs. However, as the CSEC 2017 guidelines do not define what constitutes a standalone undergraduate cybersecurity degree, the computing community needs to agree on parameters of what such a degree ought to be. To this end, ABET has created flexible accreditation criteria for cybersecurity programs guided extensively by CSEC 2017 and community input. These criteria were used to conduct pilot accreditation visits of four distinct cybersecurity programs in 2017-18. This panel discusses benefits, challenges, and costs of cybersecurity program accreditation. The panelists, who represent the first four ABET-accredited cybersecurity programs, will discuss major curricular features of their programs, their motivation for participating in the pilot accreditation, the effort in preparing for accreditation, and the benefits anticipated both for their programs and the larger computing community due to program accreditation