2nd Annual Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

Incorporating security mechanisms at the foundation of contemporary software systems has become mandatory for many applications. Universities must empower graduating software engineers with the necessary system / network security education and programming skills that various software developing houses expect. In this presentation, I discuss the design and implementation of a set of pedagogical programming projects that supplement an undergraduate semester-long introductory course on information security, which I helped design at my institution. These projects introduce the students to the use of security software libraries in order to implement a diverse array of security mechanisms such as encryption, key exchange, and message authentication / integrity checking. These projects gradually increase in complexity as the semester progresses, and provide an opportunity for follow-up capstone projects suitable for honor classes and/or independent studies.

The projects have the following learning objectives:

i.apply symmetric-key cryptography to protect the confidentiality of arbitrary data,

ii.use public-key cryptography for the exchange of session keys,

iii.validate the integrity of messages and authenticate their senders,

iv.launch a simple attack to exploit a vulnerable protocol, and

v.master the use of big integer arithmetic to implement various cryptographic protocols.