Spreading SEEDs: Large-Scale Dissemination of Hands-on Labs for Security Education

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This capacity building project seeks to addresses the lack of opportunities for students for experiential learning of Cybersecurity. Although there is no overall shortage of labs anymore, many instructors do not feel comfortable using them in their courses. This project has a potential to help many instructors to provide hands-on learning opportunities to their students. The project is based on the 30 SEED labs, which were developed and tested by the PI over the last ten years and are used by over 150 instructors from 26 countries. These labs cover a wide spectrum of security principles and they have proven to be effective in enhancing student learning. The project will also develop new labs to cover a timely topic in Cybersecurity education: security in mobile computing. The NSF's CyberCorps® SFS program funds projects that address cybersecurity education and workforce development. The Scholarship Track provides funding to award scholarships to students in cybersecurity. In return for their scholarships, recipients will work after graduation for a Federal, State, Local, or Tribal Government organization in a position related to cybersecurity for a period equal to the length of the scholarship. The Capacity Track seeks innovative proposals leading to an increase in the ability of the United States higher education enterprise to produce cybersecurity professionals. There are two specific objectives of this project: 1) to dramatically increase the number of users of the SEED labs by organizing several summer workshops with about 30 participants each and by developing free online course modules, one for each lab, using one of the existing Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) platforms; and 2) to develop new hands-on labs to address security of mobile devices which have introduced their unique Cybersecurity problems. The ultimate goal of this project is to make a transformative impact on academic institutions offering Cybersecurity courses. The project sets its goal to reach 700 schools, or about 15 percent of all universities and colleges in the United States. This will create a strong community that will carry the objectives of this project far beyond its expiration date. The project will also cultivate the integration of education and research in the area of mobile system security. The proposed Mobi-SEED labs are derived from the cutting-edge research projects on mobile-system security.