Daniel Manson

The case for depth in cybersecurity education

In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell describes the 10,000-Hour Rule, a key to success in any field, as simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years [10]. Ongoing changes in technology and national security needs require aspiring excellent cybersecurity professionals to set a goal of 10,000 hours of relevant, hands-on skill development. The education system today is ill prepared to meet the challenge of producing an adequate number of cybersecurity professionals, but programs that use competitions and learning environments that teach depth are filling this void.

The Cybersecurity Competition Federation

In a time of global crisis in cybersecurity, competitions and related activities are rapidly emerging to provide fun and engaging ways of developing and assessing cybersecurity knowledge and skills. However, there is no neutral organization that brings them together to promote collective efforts and address common issues. This paper will describe the rationale and process for developing the Cybersecurity Competition Federation (CCF) (National Science Foundation Award DUE- 134536) which was created to facilitate a community that promotes cybersecurity competitions and related activities. CCFs vision is to maintain an engaged and thriving ecosystem of cybersecurity competitions and related activities to build career awareness and cybersecurity skill to address a global shortage of cybersecurity professionals.

Panel Session - Learning Modules for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance In Undergraduate Engineering Education

Computer trustworthiness continues to increase in importance as a pressing scientific, economic, and social problem. In todays environment, there is heightened awareness of the threat of well-funded professional cyber hackers and the potential for nation-state sponsored cyber warfare. An accelerating trend of the last decade has been the growing integration role of computing and communication in critical infrastructure systems that now have complex interdependencies rooted in information technologies. These overlapping and interacting trends force us to recognize that trustworthiness of our computer systems is not an IT issue any more; it has a direct and immediate impact on our critical infrastructure. Security is often a collective enterprise, with complicated interdependencies and composition issues among a variety of participants. This poses a challenge for traditional engineering education models and curricula. The panel will discuss experiences and strategies to establish curricular foundation elements providing CSET graduates with an understanding of the interaction between cyber security, critical infrastructure systems and public policy