Teaching Network Administration in the Era of Virtualization

Wang, Yan; Blum, Thomas; McCoey, Margaret

doi:10.1145/3125659.3125678

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our department offers programs in Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT), and is planning a new program in Cybersecurity. This EH course serves Cybersecurity majors as a required course and senior CS/IT majors as a major elective course after the preparation from a list of upstream courses: Data Communications [23], Programming Concepts, Database Management Systems, LANs and Network Administration [24], Administrative Scripting, Client-Side Scripting, and Information Security [25]. The former six upstream courses provide students with background in three areas: networking, programming, and databases.…”

Section: Background and Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing an Undergraduate Course Curriculum for Ethical Hacking

Wang

McCoey

2020

Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An Ethical Hacking (EH) course not only is a critical component for a Cybersecurity program but also an essential preparation for CS/IT majors towards career paths as security professionals. We face two major challenges when developing an undergraduate EH course, including the setup and choice of the lab design, and the choice and organization of covered topics for this course. On one hand, we have limited space, budget and technical support for a course that relies heavily on hands-on exercises. Given the nature of this course, the lab activities are often "offensive" and lab operations demand administrative privileges, which cause compliance issues with the university's IT policies. On the other hand, given the vast variety of topics and the fast pace of the field, it is difficult to select and organize an essential set of knowledge units to ensure that students are exposed to current technologies and prepared to be industry-ready. We adopt two major design principles to address these challenges correspondingly. First, our choice of a hybrid Virtual Machine (VM)-based and Web-based labs provides students the full set of privileges to perform lab activities without posing threats to the campus network. The Web-based labs remove high cost of hardware and avoid overwhelming installations and configurations for the lab. Second, given the diversity of topics and fast developments in this field, we choose topics based on four criteria: representative, current, certification-related, and foundations for other covered concepts. The chosen topics are aligned with three EH certificates, and organized into twelve modules with clear intermodule and intra-module logic. This paper details the curriculum of this EH course and elaborates how our design principles are entailed in the course.

show abstract

Section: Background and Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%