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。大量具有复杂程序和各种漏洞的安全协议对教师和学生来说仍然是一个具有挑战性的话题。尽管许多教师试图向学生灌输“各种安全协议仅由有限数量的原语构建”的概念，但缺乏演示环境和实践练习严重影响了他们的学习成果。该合作项目正在开发一套创新的数字建设集，集成了安全教育和可视化的成果。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，以帮助学生架起安全原语和协议的桥梁。这种方法应用了从玩具构建集中学到的教学方法，将安全原语视为乐高积木，将协议视为构建结果。协议分解的自动演示揭示了原语与协议之间的关系，而实践实验为学生在协议设计过程中灵活应用原语提供了有效的训练。所提出的方法的模块化结构还允许教师和学生轻松地进行扩展。数字乐高套装、综合演示和实验套件以及相应的可视化工具正在通过以下方式显著改善信息保障课程：(1)帮助学生架起安全原语与协议之间的桥梁，提高对课程内容的理解；(2)培养学生灵活运用原语进行各种需求下安全协议设计与评估的技能；(3)提供友好、鼓励的平台和一组演示与实验样本，协助教师编写课程教材；(4)提供评估教学方法有效性的环境(5)使教师能够轻松地共享、扩展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