Bridging Security Primitives and Protocols: A Digital LEGO Set for Information Assurance Courses

计算机科学（31）对信息保障教育的需求持续上升。大量的安全协议，复杂的程序和各种漏洞仍然是一个具有挑战性的话题，教师和学生。虽然许多教师试图向学生灌输“各种安全协议都是由有限数量的原语构建的”的概念，但缺乏演示环境和实践练习严重影响了学生的学习效果。本合作项目正在开发一种创新的数字构建套件，将安全教育和可视化的成果整合在一起。基于这种集成，PI正在设计一套全面的教学演示和动手实验，以帮助学生桥接安全原语和协议。这种方法适用于教学方法从玩具建设集通过处理安全原语作为乐高积木和协议的建设结果。而协议分解的自动演示揭示了原语和协议之间的关系，动手实验提供了一个有效的训练，学生在协议设计过程中灵活地应用原语。所提出的方法的模块化结构也使教师和学生能够轻松扩展。数字乐高套件，演示和实验的综合套件以及相应的可视化工具通过以下方式显着改善信息保证课程：（1）帮助学生在安全原语和协议之间架起桥梁，提高他们对课程内容的理解（2）培养学生在不同需求下灵活运用原语设计和评估安全协议的能力（3）提供一个友好和鼓励性的平台和一组演示和实验样本，以协助教师准备课程材料（4）提供一个环境，以评估教学方法的有效性，通过使用建设集在成人教育（5）使教师能够轻松地共享，扩大和修改他们的课程材料

Computer Science (31) The demand for information assurance education continues to rise. The large number of security protocols with complex procedures and various vulnerabilities remain a challenging topic for both faculty and students. Although many instructors try to implant the notion in the minds of students that "various security protocols are constructed by only a limited number of primitives," the lack of a demonstration environment and hands-on exercises severely impacts their learning outcomes.This collaborative project is developing an innovative digital construction set that integrates the achievements in security education and visualization. Based on this integration, the PIs are designing a comprehensive suite of instructional demonstrations and hands-on experiments to assist students to bridge the security primitives and protocols. This approach applies the pedagogical methods learned from toy construction sets by treating security primitives as LEGO pieces and protocols as construction results. While the automatic demonstrations of protocol decomposition expose the relationship among the primitives and protocols, the hands-on experiments provide an effective training for students to apply primitives flexibly during protocol design. The modularized structure of the proposed approach also enables easy extensions by teachers and students.The digital LEGO set, the comprehensive suite of demonstrations and experiments, and corresponding visualization tools are significantly improving information assurance courses by: (1)Helping students bridge the security primitives and protocols and improving their understanding of the course contents(2)Cultivating student skills to flexibly apply primitives to the design and evaluation of security protocols under various requirements(3)Providing a friendly and encouraging platform and a group of demonstration and experiment samples to assist instructors to prepare their course materials(4)Providing an environment to evaluate the effectiveness of pedagogical methods by using construction sets in adult education(5)Enabling instructors to easily share, expand, and modify their course materials