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

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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