Toward Curricular Guidelines for Cybersecurity Education: Defining Educational Standards for an Emerging Discipline

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Given the imbalance between the demand for cybersecurity professionals and the supply provided by the nation's higher education enterprise, there is an expectation of rapid growth in the number of cybersecurity-related academic programs in the near future. The proposed project will take important steps towards defining comprehensive curricular standards for cybersecurity education and its outcomes can potentially transform cybersecurity education in the US and internationally. The project includes the full participation of academia, government and industry stakeholders throughout the development process and in key leadership roles. It also recognizes that the development of a strong cybersecurity workforce is a global concern and the project invites global contributions to curriculum development efforts.The Cyber Education Project (CEP) was started in 2014 with the dual goals of(1)establishing curricular guidelines for undergraduate cybersecurity programs that are endorsed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society; and 2)developing discipline-specific criteria that would lead to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Cyber Sciences accreditation. The work to be performed through this proposal addresses mostly the first goal - it will establish curricular guidelines for cybersecurity undergraduate programs that are endorsed by major global computing associations - but it will also inform the ABET accreditation process. The activities and deliverables will include organization of the International Security Education Workshop in June 2016 and disseminating the associated workshop report; a curricular volume providing guidelines for cybersecurity undergraduate programs; and roadmaps to guide the implementation of the curricular guidance for a range of constituency groups. The project plans for broad community engagement across the range of academic constituencies - to include computing disciplines, social and behavioral science disciplines, and applied content areas. It will also provide a continuous formative assessment and adjustment throughout the curriculum development process.