Cyber Practicals
Practical Cyber Security Exercises for the Undergraduate Syllabus
Practical Cyber Security Exercises for the Undergraduate Syllabus
Eleven cyber security exercises have now been externally reviewed in their final form; they are freely available, please email us if you would like copies.
The exercises are distributed as automatically-installing source packages onto a base virtual machine; this is straightforward and is described in an administration guide. The exercises page on this site provides short descriptions of the current practicals.
The British Computer Society (BCS) require cyber security to be included in accredited undergraduate courses in the UK (See BCS Guidelines on course accreditation). The BCS_Themes page on this site provides a matrix suggesting how these exercises contribute to meeting BCS learning outcomes.
Our thanks go to the team of students who spent the summer of 2016 working on this project, and to all those that provided feedback or detailed reviews of this work.
The cyber-practicals initiative was funded by the Higher Education Authority to help introduce security teaching in further and higher education across the UK.
There is an established concern that computer science graduates join industry without knowledge of basic security practices and as a result systems continue to be designed with basic, well known, security errors.
Security teaching within computer science is best integrated within topics such as networks, compilers and software engineering, rather than taught as a separate subject. However, the problem with integrating security teaching in this way is that effective and engaging practical exercises are expensive, and their development requires specialist security skills.
This project will assist computer science teaching in the UK by providing practical exercises to help subject matter lecturers introduce security elements and reinforce learning security skills in undergraduate programs. The exercises are designed for FHEQ levels 4 and 5, allowing their use in Certificate level courses as well as within the first years of a Bachelor's degree.
