On designing a cybersecurity educational program for higher education

Cybersecurity education is critical for preparing current and future IT professionals to deal with the multitude of security threats that occur worldwide on an ever-increasing scale. We believe that this issue can be addressed most effectively at the level of higher education, which provides the best balance of existing skills and available resources as needed for such highly-technical topics. In this paper we present first of all a methodology for designing a cybersecurity educational program, so that it becomes easier for all interested parties to design such programs, which helps extending the global scale of cybersecurity education. Secondly, we describe in detail how we applied our methodology to design an appropriate cybersecurity program for the case of higher education in Japan, followed by a discussion of the current state of our endeavor.