SaTC: EDU: Building a Cyber Security Enhanced Education Laboratory for Hands-on Experience Oriented Cybersecurity Education

To enhance the Nation’s cybersecurity, it is imperative to enlarge the workforce pipeline of domestic talent entering the field and broaden its diversity. Unlike many existing cybersecurity courses that mainly offer conceptual overviews and theoretical analysis, this project aims to integrate theories with well-structured hands-on practice activities.

This project will develop the New Hampshire Cyber Security Enhanced Education Laboratory (NHCyberSEE Lab) to achieve this integration of theory and hands-on experience. The NHCyberSEE Lab will directly benefit a large population of college students and employees in small businesses. This education project plays a critical role in the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Cybersecurity Leadership, Education and Outreach (CCLEO), accredited by the Department of Homeland Security.

The project builds a strong connection between cybersecurity education and outreach. By promoting the education of students who have to date been underrepresented in their participation in cybersecurity courses of study, this objective holds potential to increase the diversity of the cybersecurity workforce.

Four goals guide this project. First is to develop a comprehensive evaluation kit for attack analysis and defense strategy assessment. Second is to advance the existing ad-hoc cybersecurity courses by supplementing the curriculum with training in practical skills, such as attack detection and mitigation.

Third is to establish a cybersecurity minor, two certificate programs, and an internship pipeline to enrich the University of New Hampshire (UNH) teaching infrastructure and to build strong ties between UNH and community colleges and businesses in New Hampshire. The fourth and final goal aims to enhance existing outreach programs to attract K-12 students to STEM and increase the participation of underrepresented groups in cybersecurity education and research.

The facilities available in the NHCyberSEE Lab reinforce students’ skill sets in hardware/software/system/network-level attack injection, detection, and mitigation. This project supports the development of a series of cybersecurity courses, from discovery courses for STEM and non-STEM students, undergraduate-level core curriculum and professional electives, graduate-level courses, to certificate completion internship courses.

Outcomes of this project include hands-on projects, experience-oriented courses, and four outreach programs. This project will facilitate the transfer of research outcomes from previous NSF-funded projects into education materials to benefit a large pool of students.

This project is supported by the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, which funds proposals that address cybersecurity and privacy, and in this case specifically cybersecurity 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.