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。对于教师和学生来说，具有复杂程序和各种漏洞的大量安全协议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这样一种观念，即“各种安全协议是由有限的原语构建的”，但由于缺乏演示环境和动手练习，严重影响了他们的学习结果。这个合作项目正在开发一套创新的数字构建集，将安全教育和可视化的成果整合在一起。在这种集成的基础上，PI正在设计一套全面的教学演示和动手实验，以帮助学生在安全原语和协议之间架起桥梁。这种方法应用了从玩具构造集学到的教学方法，将安全原语视为乐高积木，将协议视为构造结果。虽然协议分解的自动演示揭示了原语与协议之间的关系，但动手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培训。所提出的方法的模块化结构还使教师和学生能够轻松地扩展。数字乐高装置，全面的演示和实验套件，和相应的可视化工具显著改进了信息保障课程：(1)帮助学生在安全原语和协议之间架起桥梁，并提高他们对课程内容的理解(2)培养学生在不同要求下灵活地将原语应用于安全协议设计和评估的技能(3)提供一个友好和鼓舞人心的平台和一组演示和实验样本，以帮助教师准备他们的课程材料(4)提供一个环境，通过在成人教育中使用构造集来评估教学方法的有效性(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