Learning Objectives
Define cybersecurity principles: data availability and resource integrity
Describe potential security threats to resources
Identify the characteristics of legitimate and malicious requests
Apply defense strategy to protect resources
Activity
Students initially complete the implementation of an in-memory linear container data structure. This structure is used as a cache. A testing system then executes multiple data sets on it representing benign and attack workloads. The benchmark performance results are presented to the students via a web-based interface, who analyze the results to learn how common and attack workloads affect system availability and integrity. In the subsequent activity, students learn to use learn recently cache eviction policy to deal attack overload. Thus with this activity, students will have learned how to implement and apply a defense strategy to achieve data availability and resource integrity even in the face of realistic cyber attacks. To know more about the activity, click activity content.
Surveys
A pre-test was conducted before the sessions were organized. Both the pre and post-tests were structured to capture the students’ demographic information, their perception of the learning objectives, the extent to which they consider the course to be useful and interesting. Besides, their grasp of the concepts was tested with some content questions relevant to the module. Ultimately, an analysis of the test results helped us evaluate the effectiveness of cybersecurity project. Click Pre Survey and Post Survey to download the pdf documents of the survey
Results
About 270 and 64 students took the tests from CS and CPE respectively
Based on paired t-test results, we could observe an improvement in student performance from pre to post tests
Refer to SIGCSE paper to know more about the curriculum development process and results