EAGER: SaTC-EDU: A Life-Cycle Approach for Artificial Intelligence-Based Cybersecurity Education

In order to devise more effective defenses against a rising number of cyber attacks, recent security solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. While there are plenty of publicly available AI approaches to cybersecurity, successful use depends on users’ technical and soft skills. Moreover, AI-based approaches have been intensely scrutinized with respect to their security and ethics, delaying deployment.

AI itself can be attacked and there can also be issues with discrimination in AI-based classification. Thus, for AI to be effectively and quickly adopted for cybersecurity, AI security and ethics need to be assured. Training cybersecurity professionals to understand how to effectively use AI for cybersecurity and to be aware of AI security and ethics issues is critical for effective design and deployment of AI-based cybersecurity solutions.

Future cybersecurity professionals must also be able effectively to communicate relevant information related to AI-based security mechanisms and policies to a variety of stakeholders. This project will design competency-driven educational activities focusing on AI techniques for cybersecurity that will increase the effective and ethical application of AI-enhanced cybersecurity.

The project’s educational approach is based on four interrelated pillars. The first pillar focuses on educational activities covering a systematic AI-powered approach to cybersecurity, based on defender and attacker perspectives. The second pillar focuses on educational activities covering a systematic analysis of categories of AI attack and corresponding mitigation techniques.

The third and fourth pillars focus on AI ethics and approaches to cybersecurity communications, respectively. A combination of social, philosophical, and technical perspectives will create a unique approach to cybersecurity communication. Together, the pillars provide a systematic perspective of AI-powered cybersecurity.

They provide both foundational and technical competencies related to AI ethics and cybersecurity communication that benefit multiple stakeholders, from students and educators to employers and regulators. An important goal of the project is to make sure that students and educators understand that cybersecurity, including AI-based defense techniques, requires deployment of different types of defense approaches.

The project includes design of educational projects, focusing on well-known data breaches and other types of attack and how AI-based security techniques could prevent or mitigate these attacks.

This project is supported by a special initiative of the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program to foster new, previously unexplored, collaborations between the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and education. The SaTC program aligns with the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan and the National Privacy Research Strategy to protect and preserve the growing social and economic benefits of cyber systems while ensuring security and privacy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.