Motivating secure coding practices in a freshman-level programming course

Secure application development is becoming even more critical as the impact of insecure code becomes deeper and more pervasive in our personal and professional lives. The approach described in this paper seeks to motivate computer science students to write secure code almost from the very beginning by focusing on concrete examples of common software vulnerabilities in the second freshman-level programming course. Sample exercises and assignments are given as examples that can be reused in similar courses. While long-term data collection is still ongoing, initial results are promising enough that the method is presented here in detail to support university faculty interested in incorporating lessons and real-world examples in secure app development in their programming courses at any level.