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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. 

Year after year, computing systems continue to grow in complexity at an exponential rate. While this can have far-ranging positive impacts on society, it has become extremely difficult to ensure the security of these systems in the field. Hardware security - in conjunction with more traditional cybersecurity topics like software and network security - is critical for designing secure systems. Moving forward, hardware security education must ensure the next generation of engineers have the knowledge and tools to address this growing challenge. A good foundation in hardware security draws on concepts from several different fields, including fundamental hardware design principles, signal processing and statistics, and even machine learning for modeling complex physical processes. It can be difficult to convey the material in a manageable way, even to advanced undergraduate students. In this paper, we describe how we have leveraged Python, and its rich ecosystem of open-source libraries, and scaffolding with Jupyter notebooks, to bridge the gap between theory and implementation of hardware security topics, helping students learn through experience. 

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. 

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and increasing reliance on network-connected devices, IoT security, which integrates components of hardware and cybersecurity, is more important than ever. Hence, we must improve and expand training opportunities for students in IoT security. Experiential learning is an essential component of education for engineering and cybersecurity in particular. In this work, we describe three comprehensive hands-on IoT security experiments built using off-the-shelf development boards which can provide a low-cost and accessible experiential learning opportunity for students in this area. 

Practical, hands-on hardware experience is an essential component of computer engineering education. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, courses with laboratory components such as Computer Logic Design or FPGA Design were subject to interruption from sudden changes in course modality. While simulators can cover some aspects of laboratory work, they cannot fully replace the hands-on experience students receive working with and debugging hardware. For hardware security in particular, experimenting with attacks and countermeasures on real hardware is vital. In this paper, we describe our approach to designing a practical, hands-on hardware security course that is suitable for HyFlex delivery. We have developed a total of nine experiments utilizing two inexpensive, portable, and self--contained development boards which generally obviate the need for bench equipment. We discuss the trade-offs inherent in the course and experiment design, as well as issues relating to deployment and support for the required design software.