Data Science for Cybersecurity

Members

• Jelena Mirkovic, USC
• Deepak Desai, USC
• Hailu Xu, CSU Long Beach
• Zhengxiong Li, UC Denver

Overview

In this work we are developing a large set of hands-on, virtual materials for teaching data science for cybersecurity. These materials will be hosted on the SPHERE research infrastructure and will be publicly and freely available to interested teachers and students. Our materials will include both individual and group assignments. Individual assignments will come at three difficulty levels -- beginner, intermediate and advanced -- to support different learners. Individual materials will be amenable to self-learning: they will be broken into small tasks, and will include ways for students to verify if they have succesfully completed an exercise. Individual materials will cover the entire life-cycle of cybersecurity data: collection, processing, storage, management, analytics, and decision-making. Group problems will engage groups of students on realistic, integrative cybersecurity tasks to promote teamwork, collaboration and communication, and to build integrative knowledge. They will also cover the entire life-cycle of cybersecurity data.

In addition to material development, our team will:

1. use developed materials in their classes, impacting around 250 students per year,
2. promote developed materials to a large community of cybersecurity educators and provide virtual teacher training,
3. coordinate student evaluation efforts,
4. create means for teachers to contribute new materials to our public repository.