Collaborative Research: Bridging Security Primitives and Protocols: A Digital LEGO Set for Information Assurance Courses
Project Award Date: 03-15-2007
Description
With the ever increasing demands for information assurance education, more and more institutions are offering security courses. The large number of security protocols with complex procedures and various vulnerabilities remains a challenging topic in the classroom, not to mention cultivating students’capabilities to apply them flexibly. Although many instructors try to implant the notion that "various security protocols are constructed by only a limited number of primitives," the lack of a demonstration environment and hands-on exercises severely impacts learning outcomes.
The objective of this project is to develop an innovative digital construction set that integrates achievements in security education and visualization into the design of a comprehensive suite of instructional demonstrations and hands-on experiments. These will assist students in learning security primitives and protocols. The approach applies the pedagogical methods learned from toy construction sets by treating security primitives as LEGO pieces and protocols as construction results. While the automatic demonstrations of protocol decomposition expose the relationship among the primitives and protocols, the hands-on experiments provide an effective training for students to apply primitives flexibly during protocol design. The modularized structure of the proposed approach also enables easy extensions by teachers and students.
In collaboration with University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Investigators
Faculty Investigator(s): Weichao Wang (PI)
Project Sponsors
Primary Sponsor(s): NSF
