Global perspectives on cybersecurity education for 2030: a case for a meta-discipline

Abstract

Information security has been an area of research and teaching within various computing disciplines in higher education almost since the beginnings of modern computers. The need for security in computing curricula has steadily grown over this period. Recently, with an emerging global crisis, because of the limitations of security within the nascent information technology infrastructure, the field of "cybersecurity" is emerging with international interest and support. Recent evolution of cybersecurity shows that it has begun to take shape as a true academic perspective, as opposed to simply being a training domain for certain specialized jobs. This report starts from the premise that cybersecurity is a "meta-discipline." That is, cybersecurity is used as an aggregate label for a wide variety of similar disciplines, much in the same way that the terms "engineering" and "computing" are commonly used. Thus, cybersecurity should be formally interpreted as a meta-discipline with a variety of disciplinary variants, also characterized through a generic competency model. The intention is that this simple organizational concept will improve the clarity with which the field matures, resulting in improved standards and goals for many different types of cybersecurity programs.