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  1. This paper presents an innovative approach to DevOps security education, addressing the dynamic landscape of cybersecurity threats. We propose a student-centered learning methodology by developing comprehensive hands-on learning modules. Specifically, we introduce labware modules designed to automate static security analysis, empowering learners to identify known vulnerabilities efficiently. These modules offer a structured learning experience with pre-lab, hands-on, and post-lab sections, guiding students through DevOps concepts and security challenges. In this paper, we introduce hands-on learning modules that familiarize students with recognizing known security flaws through the application of Git Hooks. Through practical exercises with real-world code examples containing security flaws, students gain proficiency in detecting vulnerabilities using relevant tools. Initial evaluations conducted across educational institutions indicate that these hands-on modules foster student interest in software security and cybersecurity and equip them with practical skills to address DevOps security vulnerabilities. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 2, 2025
  2. Large Language Models (LLMs) have extensive ability to produce promising output. Nowadays, people are increasingly relying on them due to easy accessibility, rapid and outstanding outcomes. However, the use of these results without appropriate scrutiny poses serious security risks, particularly when they are integrated with other software, APIs, or plugins. This is because the LLM outputs are highly dependent on the prompts they receive. Therefore, it is essential to carefully clean these outputs before using them in additional software environments. This paper is designed to teach students about the potential dangers of contaminated LLM output within the context of web development through prelab, handson, and postlab experiences. Hands-on lab provides practical guidance on how to handle LLM vulnerabilities to make applications safe with some real-world examples in Python. This approach aims to provide students with a deeper understanding of the precautions necessary to ensure software against the vulnerabilities introduced by LLM output. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 2, 2025
  3. Large Language Models (LLMs) have extensive ability to produce promising output. Nowadays, people are increasingly relying on them due to easy accessibility, rapid and outstanding outcomes. However, the use of these results without appropriate scrutiny poses serious security risks, particularly when they are integrated with other software, APIs, or plugins. This is because the LLM outputs are highly dependent on the prompts they receive. Therefore, it is essential to carefully clean these outputs before using them in additional software environments. This paper is designed to teach students about the potential dangers of contaminated LLM output within the context of web development through prelab, handson, and postlab experiences. Hands-on lab provides practical guidance on how to handle LLM vulnerabilities to make applications safe with some real-world examples in Python. This approach aims to provide students with a deeper understanding of the precautions necessary to ensure software against the vulnerabilities introduced by LLM output. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 2, 2025
  4. Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 2, 2025
  5. The pivotal role of white-box testing with respect to software quality assurance, necessitates dissemination of education materials related to white-box testing in the course curriculum. In this poster, we describe our experiences in conducting an authentic learning based exercise related to white-box testing. From a conducted survey with 124 students, we observe the authentic learning-based exercise to be helpful for students to learn about white-box testing. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 20, 2025
  6. Social media cyberbullying has a detrimental effect on human life. As online social networking grows daily, the amount of hate speech also increases. Such terrible content can cause depression and actions related to suicide. This paper proposes a trustable LSTM Autoencoder Network for cyberbullying detection on social media using synthetic data. We have demonstrated a cutting-edge method to address data availability difficulties by producing machine-translated data. However, several languages such as Hindi and Bangla still lack adequate investigations due to a lack of datasets. We carried out experimental identification of aggressive comments on Hindi, Bangla, and English datasets using the proposed model and traditional models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), LSTM-Autoencoder, Word2vec, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) models. We employed evaluation metrics such as f1-score, accuracy, precision, and recall to assess the models’ performance. Our proposed model outperformed all the models on all datasets, achieving the highest accuracy of 95%. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results among all the previous works on the dataset we used in this paper. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 15, 2024
  7. With the growing adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across various domains, the security of their operations is paramount. UAVs, heavily dependent on GPS navigation, are at risk of jamming and spoofing cyberattacks, which can severely jeopardize their performance, safety, and mission integrity. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are typically employed as defense mechanisms, often leveraging traditional machine learning techniques. However, these IDSs are susceptible to adversarial attacks that exploit machine learning models by introducing input perturbations. In this work, we propose a novel IDS for UAVs to enhance resilience against such attacks using generative adversarial networks (GAN). We also comprehensively study several evasion-based adversarial attacks and utilize them to compare the performance of the proposed IDS with existing ones. The resilience is achieved by generating synthetic data based on the identified weak points in the IDS and incorporating these adversarial samples in the training process to regularize the learning. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed IDS is significantly robust against adversarial machine learning based attacks compared to the state-of-the-art IDSs while maintaining a low false positive rate. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 15, 2024
  8. With the ever-growing concern for internet security, the field of quantum cryptography emerges as a promising solution for enhancing the security of networking systems. In this paper, 20 notable papers from leading conferences and journals are reviewed and categorized based on their focus on various aspects of quantum cryptography, including key distribution, quantum bit commitment, post-quantum cryptography, and counterfactual quantum key distribution. The paper explores the motivations and challenges of employing quantum cryptography, addressing security and privacy concerns along with existing solutions. Secure key distribution, a critical component in ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted information over a network, is emphasized in the discussion. The survey examines the potential of quantum cryptography to enable secure key exchange between parties, even when faced with eavesdropping, and other applications of quantum cryptography. Additionally, the paper analyzes the methodologies, findings, and limitations of each reviewed study, pinpointing trends such as the increasing focus on practical implementation of quantum cryptography protocols and the growing interest in post-quantum cryptography research. Furthermore, the survey identifies challenges and open research questions, including the need for more efficient quantum repeater networks, improved security proofs for continuous variable quantum key distribution, and the development of quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms, showing future directions for the field of quantum cryptography. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 15, 2024
  9. Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 15, 2024
  10. The field of DevOps security education necessitates innovative approaches to effectively address the ever evolving challenges of cybersecurity. Adopting a student-centered approach, there is the need for the design and development of a comprehensive set of hands-on learning modules. In this paper, we introduce hands-on learning modules that enable learners to be familiar with identifying known security weaknesses, based on taint tracking to accurately pinpoint vulnerable code. To cultivate an engaging and motivating learning environment, our hands-on approach includes a pre-lab, hands-on and post-lab sections. They all provide introduction to specific DevOps topics and software security problems at hand, followed by practicing with real world code examples having security issues to detect them using tools. The initial evaluation results from a number of courses across multiple schools show that the hands-on modules are enhancing the interests among students on software security and cybersecurity, while preparing them to address DevOps security vulnerabilities. 
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