Empowering faculty to embed security topics into computer science courses

Security illiteracy is a very common problem among Computer Science (CS) graduates entering the nation's digital workforce, which has contributed to a national cyber-infrastructure that could and should be more resilient to cyber-enemies than it is now. The Security Knitting Kit (SecKnitKit) project aims to improve security awareness, knowledge, and interest of undergraduate CS students by exposing them to computer security concepts and issues in their regular course of study. The project is developing, deploying, and disseminating a multi-faceted out-of-the-box instructional support system to empower non-security faculty. These are faculty who have no experience in teaching security but recognize the importance of security in today's world and want to broaden their teaching repertoire. This project enables them to weave relevant security topics traditional computer science courses seamlessly and effectively. The project is organized by the CS department at Tennessee Tech University (TTU) and supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DUE-1140864.