Novel Approach for Cybersecurity Workforce Development: A Course in Secure Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary course focused on secure design principles for IoT products, aiming to improve cybersecurity education through experiential learning for students from diverse backgrounds.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel interdisciplinary course combining cybersecurity and interaction design to enhance experiential learning and practical skills in secure IoT product development.

Findings

Course enables hands-on prototyping of secure IoT devices

Students from multiple disciplines acquire practical cybersecurity skills

Enhanced curriculum promotes interdisciplinary understanding of secure design

Abstract

Training the future cybersecurity workforce to respond to emerging threats requires introduction of novel educational interventions into the cybersecurity curriculum. To be effective, these interventions have to incorporate trending knowledge from cybersecurity and other related domains while allowing for experiential learning through hands-on experimentation. To date, the traditional interdisciplinary approach for cybersecurity training has infused political science, law, economics or linguistics knowledge into the cybersecurity curriculum, allowing for limited experimentation. Cybersecurity students were left with little opportunity to acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities in domains outside of these. Also, students in outside majors had no options to get into cybersecurity. With this in mind, we developed an interdisciplinary course for experiential learning in the fields of cybersecurity and interaction design. The inaugural course teaches students from cybersecurity, user interaction design, and visual design the principles of designing for secure use - or secure design - and allows them to apply them for prototyping of Internet-of-Things (IoT) products for smart homes. This paper elaborates on the concepts of secure design and how our approach enhances the training of the future cybersecurity workforce.