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Often, security topics are only taught in advanced computer science (CS) courses. However, most US R1 universities do not require students to take these courses to complete an undergraduate CS degree. As a result, students can graduate without learning about computer security and secure programming practices. To gauge students’ knowledge and skills of secure programming, we conducted a coding interview with 21 students from two R1 universities in the United States. All the students in our study had at least taken Computer Systems or an equivalent course. We then analyzed the students’ approach to safe programming practices, such as avoiding unsafe functions like gets and strcpy, and basic security knowledge, such as writing code that assumes user inputs can be malicious. Our results suggest that students lack the key fundamental skills to write secure programs. For example, students rarely pay attention to details, such as compiler warnings, and often do not read programming language documentation with care. Moreover, some students’ understanding of memory layout is cursory, which is crucial for writing secure programs. We also found that some students are struggling with even the basics of C programming, even though it is the main language taught in Computer Systems courses.
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A Secure Software Engineering Design Framework for Educational Purpose
Ensuring software security is a critical task for a deliverable software system in today’s world, and its proper implementation guarantees the quality and security of the information ingested, stored, and processed by the system. It is imperative to introduce computer science and computer engineering students (CS/CE) with the secure software design practices early in their curriculum. This approach will help them understand fundamentals of secure programming, vulnerabilities in software systems, and secure software development before joining the industry workforce. In this paper, we propose an educational framework that integrates software security concepts in a software engineering design course. We envision that the framework will engage CS/CE students applying security principles and practices in different phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) process. Our work focuses on review of common security requirements, policies, and mechanisms related to specific use cases as well as how those requirements are defined during the software design.
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- PAR ID:
- 10427440
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (eIT)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 375 to 381
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/eIT53891.2022.9837112
