ITEC 545: Cybersecurity Education

• Graduate course for educators
• School of Computing and Information Sciences
  
• Radford University, Virginia
• Partially funded by NSA MEPP grant# H98230-15-1-0210

Summary

Overview

This course is for educators from middle, high school or community college who want to do one or more of the following:

• Start a security program formally or informally but aren’t sure how
• Introduce security into existing classes
• Get an introduction and become conversant with fundamental IT and security concepts and terms
• Get a perspective on the diversity of careers in cyber security
• Get a deep understanding of the security and privacy issues of social networking sites
• Get hands on experience with hacking and problem solving in IT
• Inspire and mentor students who want to participate in cyber security contests such as the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot

Course topics

The course will cover and provide educators with everything they need to provide a broad introduction to cyber security for their students. Security will be taught in the context of social networking and mobile phones – contexts that students and teachers can easily relate with.

Specific topics

1. Need for cyber security – understanding the security and privacy issues and threats to infrastructure;
2. Diversity of careers – why cyber security expertise is not limited to only IT professionals: guest lectures from law enforcement, government and industry;
3. Curriculum resources on cyber security education: How existing resources can be easily incorporated for students to self-study
   1. Course material examples: Radford’s K-12 curriculum and modules
   2. Lab resources available (Examples: Deterlab, EMULab etc)
4. Setting up a lab to conduct cyber security experiments.
5. Basics concepts of cyber security introduced around the context of social networking and mobile phones
   1. Security goals
   2. Vulnerabilities, threats and exploits
   3. Anatomy of an attack (hacking)
   4. Security analysis – how secure is your mobile phone?
   5. Security mechanisms: cryptography, application and network security
   6. Coaching for success in cyber defense contests.

Assessment Measures

Assessment will be through projects, short reports and/or discussions. Examples include:

• Report surveying cyber security resources;
• Projects involving hacking into a social networking site (site created at Radford);
• Setting up a security lab and using existing lab resources;
• Performing a security analysis (how secure?) of a mobile device;
• Harden a computational network.

Interested? Next Steps

• To register for the course students must register as non-degree seeking graduate students at Radford University. Application form here: https://www.applyweb.com/radg/index.ftl.
  • There is a fee of $50 for application that must be paid upfront.
  • A stipend of $450 will be applied to a limited number of educators (about 15 on a first applied basis.  The amount will be credited to your account once you are registered as a student. This will cover the fees for 1 credit ($355). The rest $95 will be sent to your address as a stipend.
• Email: Dr. Prem Uppuluri (puppuluri@radford.edu), Coordinator of the Cyber Security Program for more information.