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1. Improving Student Learning in Hardware Security: Project Vision, Overview, and Experiences

   https://doi.org/10.1109/iSES54909.2022.00067  

   Karam, Robert; Katkoori, Srinivas; Mozaffari-Kermani, Mehran (December 2022, 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES))

   Practical, hands-on experience is an essential component of computer science and engineering education, especially in the cybersecurity domain. In this project, we are investigating techniques for improving student learning in such courses, first by developing a new hands-on hardware security course, then by testing the impact of gamification on student learning. The experiments utilize only inexpensive, open-source or freely-available software and hardware, and upon project completion, the modules themselves will also be made freely available online. Improving student learning in this critical area can have a wide-spread positive societal impact as we encourage students to have a security-first, secure-by-design mindset. 

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2. Teaching the Next Generation of Cryptographic Hardware Design to the Next Generation of Engineers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3299874.3317994  

   Aysu, Aydin (May 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI)

   Evolving threats against cryptographic systems and the increasing diversity of computing platforms enforce teaching cryptographic engineering to a wider audience. This paper describes the development of a new graduate course on hardware security taught at North Carolina State University. The course targets an audience with no background on cryptography or hardware vulnerabilities. The course focuses especially on post-quantum cryptosystems—the next-generation cryptosystems mitigating quantum computer attacks—and evolves into designing specialized hardware accelerators for post-quantum cryptography, executing sophisticated implementation attacks (e.g., side-channel and fault attacks), and building countermeasures on such hardware designs. We discuss the curriculum design, hands-on assignment’s development, final research project outcome, and the results obtained from the course together with the associated challenges. Our experience shows that such a course is feasible, can achieve its goals, and liked by the students, but there is room for improvement. 

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3. Vertically Integrated Computing Labs Using Open-Source Hardware Generators and Cloud-Hosted FPGAs

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS51556.2021.9401515  

   Amid, Alon; Ou, Albert; Asanovic, Krste; Shao, Yakun Sophia; Nikolic, Borivoje (May 2021, 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS))

   null (Ed.)

   The design of computing systems has changed dramatically over the past decade, but most courses in advanced computer architecture remain unchanged. Computer architecture education lies at the intersection between computer science and electrical engineering, with practical exercises in classes based on appropriate levels of abstraction in the computing system design stack. Hardware-centric lab exercises often require broad infrastructure resources and tend to navigate around tedious practical implementation concepts, while software-centric exercises leave a gap between modeling and system implementation implications that students later need to overcome in professional settings. Vertical integration trends in domain-specific compute systems, as well as software-hardware co-design, are often covered in classroom lectures, but are not reflected in laboratory exercises due to complex tooling and simulation infrastructure. We describe our experiences with a joint hardware-software approach to exploring computer architecture concepts in class exercises, by using opensource processor hardware implementations, generator-based hardware design methodologies, and cloud-hosted FPGAs. This approach further enables scaling course enrollment, remote learning and a cross-class collaborative lab ecosystem, creating a connecting thread between computer science and electrical engineering experience-based curricula. 

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4. Engaged Student Learning with Gamified Labs: A New Approach for Hardware Security Education

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE56641.2023.10398235  

   Karam, Robert; Katkoori, Srinivas; Mozaffari-Kermani, Mehran (November 2023, IEEE)

   Hardware security is an emerging field with far-ranging impacts on the design and implementation of the devices we use in our everyday lives – from wearable and implantable medical devices to personal mobile devices, and even cloud devices powering the software services that drive our society forward. Practical, hands-on experience is vital to the training of students in this and other security-related fields. We are developing a new model for hardware security education using readily available, cost-efficient, off-the-shelf development boards, with hands-on experiments that offer new learning opportunities for students. Beyond this, we are experimenting with different pedagogical methods to improve student engagement. In particular, we aim to gamify a subset of the experiments and evaluate the impact on student engagement and learning. This work-in-progress paper describes our initial approach to the gamification of hardware security labs and reports on baseline results from our control study using a more traditional, non-gamified approach. 

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5. Teaching SDN Security Using Hands-on Labs in CloudLab

   Yuan, Xiaohong; Liu, Zhipeng; Park, Younghee; Hu, Hongxin; Li, Hongda (July 2020, Journal of the Colloquium for Information System Security Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Software-Defined Networking (SDN) represents a major transition from traditional hardware-based networks to programmable software-based networks. While SDN brings visibility, elasticity, flexibility, and scalability, it also presents security challenges. This paper describes some of the hands-on labs we developed for teaching SDN security using the CloudLab platform. The hands-on labs have been used in a graduate level course on SDN/NFV related technologies. Our teaching experience of the hands-on labs is discussed. The hands-on labs can be adopted by other instructors to teach SDN security. 

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