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Information is a critical business asset, which depends on protection by competent system administrators experienced in real-world environments and threats. With the cyber threat increasing, we need a meaningful way to train, and certify, the level of cyber competency. A cyber-defense curriculum and live-fire trainers that quantify a student’s performance are essential to the survival of our “Information Age” critical assets.

Software flaws are a root cause of many security vulnerabilities found today. Empirical evidence suggests that teaching developers techniques for secure software development can significantly reduce security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, most Computer Science curricula, including popular textbooks, have paid little attention to secure software development. In this paper we discuss possible approaches to teaching secure software development in Computing Curricula. We also share our experiences in teaching secure software development, including laboratory exercises and assignments.

The ASCENT security teaching lab provides both graduate students and undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Arlington with an opportunity to get hands-on education in both attack and defense. We developed the lab over a two-year period and have learned valuable lessons from its development and use by students. In this article, we examine the design of the lab infrastructure and the use of laptops, the design of exercises, the role of virtualization, and the use of capture the flag exercises. We also discuss the use of our labs in classes conducted at a large software company in India.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are used for military as well as commercial applications due to ease of deployment and low infrastructure cost. WSNs are being introduced for collecting patient data in healthcare and sensitive data in military applications. Hence, sensor security remains a major concern and is a challenging research area in the wireless networking community.In order to provide our undergraduate students an opportunity to exercise his or her creative side before graduation and encourage innovation and creativity, faculty at RIT have developed a course in wireless sensor network security. Our goal is to provide our undergraduate students with research experience and seed their research capability in an emerging networking area.