Capacity Building for a Cybersecurity Workforce Through Hands-on Labs for Internet-of-Things Security

Abstract

There is growing concern about a cybersecurity skills gap nationwide, as an insufficient number of students are entering this field. Hence, innovative approaches to capacity building are required. We advocate an approach that taps into public awareness and usage of internet-of-things (IoT) devices, which constitute a major source of security vulnerabilities. There is increasing student curiosity about these devices, and a growing tinkering movement.

We tap into this zeitgeist by proposing educational courseware to give students hands-on laboratory experience in designing secure embedded systems. Our initial experience at offering this courseware on the Raspberry-Pi computing platform resulted in significant student interest and engagement. We propose building on this momentum by creating further laboratory exercises focused on IoT devices in the medical and healthcare domain. This is a rich domain for security applications due to patient privacy concerns, the need to secure medical devices, and the need to share patient medical records.

The newly proposed labs will deploy RFID and barcodes to tag medical devices used in hospitals, sensors to measure patient vitals, biometrics to identify patients, and blockchain to create immutable patient records. These labs can be easily implemented with cheap sensors on the Raspberry-Pi platform, and can be replicated easily. By using this approach, we can build a national talent pool in the area of secure embedded devices.

We are in the process of developing these proposed labs. We plan to test them in a classroom setting in Fall 2019. Upon successful testing, we plan to release our labs to interested institutions.