Teaching Computer Science With Cybersecurity Education Built-in

Despite the remarkable cybersecurity education efforts from traditional approaches such as offering dedicated courses and even degree programs or tracks, the computer science curricula of many institutions still severely fall short in promoting cybersecurity education. We advocate to further explore the security integration approach to complement other approaches and better promote cybersecurity education. We contribute to this approach by concretely exploring a viable implementation solution and evaluating its effectiveness. Specifically, we explore to discuss relevant cybersecurity topics in upper and graduate level non-security courses to engage students in learning cybersecurity knowledge and skills from the perspectives of different computer science sub-areas, and help them understand the correlation and interplay between cybersecurity and other sub-areas of computer science. Our experience in six class sessions of five non-security courses is very encouraging: the majority of students found the discussed cybersecurity topics interesting, useful, and relevant; they would like to have cybersecurity topics discussed in other non-cybersecurity courses in the future; they improved their understanding of the discussed content. We hope our experience can be helpful for other educators to adopt and further explore the security integration approach in the future.