A Capstone Design Project for  Teaching Cybersecurity to Non-technical Users

This paper presents a multi-year undergraduate computing capstone project that holistically contributes to the development of cybersecurity knowledge and skills in non-computing high school and college students. We describe the student-built Vulnerable Web Server application, which is a system that packages instructional materials and pre-built virtual machines to provide lessons on cybersecurity to non-technical students. The Vulnerable Web Server learning materials have been piloted at several high schools and are now integrated into multiple security lessons in an intermediate, general education information technology course at the United States Military Academy. Our paper interweaves a description of the Vulnerable Web Server materials with the senior capstone design process that allowed it to be built by undergraduate information technology and computer science students, resulting in a valuable capstone learning experience. Throughout the paper, a call is made for greater emphasis on educating the non-technical user.

Keywords

Security and privacy, Computing education

Citation

Tanya Estes, James Finocchiaro, Jean Blair, Johnathan Robison, Justin Dalme, Michael Emana, Luke Jenkins, and Edward Sobiesk. 2016. A Capstone Design Project for Teaching Cybersecurity to Non-technical Users. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 142–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/2978192.2978216