A freshman level course on information assurance: can it be done? here's how

O ffering a freshman level course in Information Assurance (IA) that is open to all majors in a University seems like a responsible thing to do. However, IA is considered as an advanced technical topic, and its integration in undergraduate curriculums is primarily at the junior and senior level. Here we describe our experiences in designing and imparting a freshman level IA course. We discuss challenges and solutions for making the course appealing to a broad audience; strategies to increase enrollment; pedagogical techniques, and experiences from the past six semesters that such a course has been successfully taught at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). above, to interact early with the students so that they become aware of IA issues. Some of the authors had forgotten the challenges in dealing with brand new students in a university setting, and these issues are described in section four. In section five we describe our approach to satisfy the global diversity GenEd requirements at our university, followed by conclusions and acknowledgements. 2 INFORMATION SECURITY IN UNDERGRADUATE CURRICUlA ACM, AIS and IEEE curricula recommendations act as a benchmark for the body of knowledge to be disseminated in undergraduate (as well as some graduate) computing degree programs. In this section we discuss our findings for the early exposure to IA topics in the context of computing curricula recommendations. CC 2005 [3] provides undergraduate curriculum guidelines for five defined sub-disciplines of computing: Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CE), Information Systems (IS), Information Technology (IT), and Software Engineering (SE). Since all computing graduates cannot be proficient in all knowledge areas, CC 2005 recommends different weights for different sub-disciplines. With regards to such distribution IT provides the highest coverage of security implementation and management knowledge areas, whereas CS provides the highest coverage for security issues and principles knowledge areas. CS 2008 curriculum recommendations [1] now provide explicit focus on integration of security issues across its knowledge areas. Security is a focus not only in operating systems and networking knowledge areas, but also in programming to write safe and secure software. The recommended CS3xx Introduction to Computer Security course in CS 2008 requires a foundation of CS 102, and a co-requisite of data structures and algorithms in CS 103 as defined in CS 2001 [2]. As a result an in-depth treatment of fundamental principles of information security is only accessible to computing students late in their degree programs. …