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Bridging Security Primitives and Protocols: A Digital LEGO Set for Information Assurance Courses

[Overview]   [People]   [Publication]   [Presentation]   [Courses]   [Funding]  

Overview

This project tries to develop an innovative digital construction set that integrates the achievements in security education and visualization. Based on this integration, the PIs are designing a comprehensive suite of instructional demonstrations and hands-on experiments to assist students to bridge the security primitives and protocols. This approach applies the pedagogical methods learned from toy construction sets by treating security primitives as LEGO pieces and protocols as construction results. While the automatic demonstrations of protocol decomposition expose the relationship among the primitives and protocols, the hands-on experiments provide an effective training for students to apply primitives flexibly during protocol design. The modularized structure of the proposed approach also enables easy extensions by teachers and students.

The digital LEGO set, the comprehensive suite of demonstrations and experiments, and corresponding visualization tools will improve information assurance courses by:

  • Helping students bridge the security primitives and protocols and improving their understanding of the course contents
  • Cultivating student skills to flexibly apply primitives to the design and evaluation of security protocols under various requirements
  • Providing a friendly and encouraging platform and a group of demonstration and experiment samples to assist instructors to prepare their course materials
  • Enabling instructors to easily share, expand, and modify their course materials

People

    Investigators

    • Aidong Lu, Assistant Professor, CS Department, UNC Charlotte
    • Weichao Wang, Assistant Professor, SIS Department, UNC Charlotte

    Graduate Students

    Undergraduate Students

    • Lane Harrison, Undergraduate Student
    • Ver Cher, Undergraduate Student

Publication

    A Digital Lego Set and Exercises for Teaching Security Protocols, in Proceedings of Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education (CISSE), pp 26-33, Dallas, June 2008. W. Wang, A. Lu, L. Yu, and Z. Li. [PDF]
    Volume Illustration Using Wang Cubes, ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 26, 2007. Aidong Lu, David S. Ebert, Wei Qiao, Markus Kraus, Benjamin Mora.
    Shape-aware Volume Illustration, Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 26, 2007. Wei Chen, Aidong Lu, David S. Ebert.
    Stateless Key Distribution for Secure Intra and Inter-group Multicast in Mobile Wireless Networks, Elsevier Computer Networks, Volume 51, Issue 15, pp 4303--4321, Oct. 2007. W. Wang and T. Stransky. [PDF]
    Interactive Wormhole Detection and Evaluation , Information Visualization Journal (IVS), Volume 6, Issue 1, pages 3--17, Jan. 2007. W. Wang and A. Lu. [PDF]
    Homogeneous Security in Heterogeneous Networks: Towards a Generic Security Management Protocol, in Proceedings of Military Communications Conference (MilCom), 2007. Justin P. Rohrer, W. Wang, and James P.G. Sterbenz. [PDF]
    Interactive Storyboard for Overall Time-Varying Data Visualization, accepted to IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, 2008. Aidong Lu, Han-Wei Shen.

Presentation

    A Digital Lego Set and Exercises for Teaching Security Protocols, presented at Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education (CISSE), Dallas, June 2008.

Related Courses

Funding

This project is funded by the NSF Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Program. Investigators are Aidong Lu and Weichao Wang at UNC Charlotte.



Last updated in November, 2007.