This work in progress research paper focuses on effectively embedding the blockchain topic into undergraduate Computer Science (CS) programs without introducing a new course. The goal is two-fold: expose students to an important topic without requiring significant new resources, and enhance existing course materials with real world applications. The blockchain theory and technology is based on concepts that span almost the entire undergraduate CS curriculum. As such, it can aid educators in offering assignments that both reinforce lecture topics and relate to modern applications. Our work aims at providing adequate abstractions in each course to shrink the large-scale design and implementation of blockchain to modular pieces, each of which an undergraduate can understand and be expected to complete in an one or two week assignment. Current approaches to teaching blockchains focus on one course or a subset of electives. Some provide useful insights into potential assignment topics and courses in the CS program that should be targeted. Related work has also designed an interactive model of a blockchain for students to see how the various components work together. Inspired by prior work, we set out to answer the following questions: “Can we effectively teach students about blockchains by having students explore the concepts through embedded assignments?”, and “Are these assignments still within the scope of the course as described in the course syllabus?” To gain insights into these questions, a series of assignments were created targeting four CS courses. Since the student level ranged from freshman to senior the assignments fell into two categories: exploratory and implementation. Analyzed were 115 student responses collected between 2022 and 2023. The submissions consisted of the student's solution along with surveys that asked for the student's background knowledge and feedback on the assignment. Exploratory assignments were given in Introduction to Computer Science (21), and Introduction to Cybersecurity (36). Implementation based assignments were given in Hardware Systems (44), and Network Design and Security (14). In the first two courses, assignments asked students to research how blockchains work or how they are used in industry. In the last two courses, students were expected to provide a code solution to a problem along with a write up explaining their solution and the tests they ran to check functionality of their code. A background section was provided with the assignment explaining the motivation as well as expected behavior of the component of the blockchain. Instructors were encouraged to add any additional materials they deemed necessary to better prepare the class for the assignment. The data gathered so far answer positively our two research questions, as all assignments matched well the course topics, the abstractions did not overly complicate the assignment, and students increased their knowledge and skills related to blockchains. We continue to expand the availability and use of embedded blockchain assignments.

Governments provide critical services to the residents they serve such as voting information, taxes, and health services. In turn, residents must trust information coming from their governments is legitimate. This paper examines the adoption of three DNS records, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA), with governments in the United States. All three DNS records help establish legitimacy in a server's identity. From February to July 2023, SPF, DMARC, and CAA records from domains belonging to governments in the U.S. were collected, parsed, and semantically analyzed for security misconfigurations. We have developed an open source parser and analyzer to verify the syntax and security configuration of SPF and DMARC records. We found that adoption of all three records is slowly increasing, however errors and misconfigurations are disproportionately found in local, county, and state government domains.

With blockchain technology being increasingly adopted by significant segments in industry and government, it is important to expose more students to blockchain concepts in undergraduate curricula. Among the challenges with this task are the inherent complexity of blockchain based designs and the limited resources in both time and personnel in a computer science program. The purpose of this project is to design and implement a modular, publicly available learning tool that will facilitate teaching fundamental computer science concepts using a blockchain environment. We started by successfully embedding blockchain elements in two courses at the freshman and sophomore levels as week-long modules in spring 2022. Our goal is to cover the most important aspects of a blockchain by injecting material in 7-8 existing computer science courses.

Concept maps are used in education to illustrate ideas and relationships among them. Instructors employ such maps to evaluate a student’s knowledge on a subject. Collective concept maps have been recently proposed as a tool to graphically summarize a group’s rather than an individual’s understanding on a topic. In this paper, we present a methodology that automatically generates collective concept maps, which relies on grouping similar ideas into node-clusters. We present a novel clustering algorithm that is shown to produce more informational maps compared to Markov clustering. We evaluate the collective map framework by applying it to sets of a total of 56 individual maps created by teachers (grades 2-12) and students (grades 6-11) during a week-long cybersecurity camp. Finally, we discuss how collective concept maps can support longitudinal research studies on program and student outcomes by providing a novel format for knowledge exchange. We have made our tool implementation publicly available.

Cybersecurity ranges allow students to explore challenges in realistic system conditions and often play a central role in related courses. The pre-built scenarios also serve well in "capture the flag'' competitions. Existing ranges are typically built using server equipment that is difficult to transport or are hosted as virtual machines. We have created a mobile cyber range by porting existing exercises to Raspberry Pis. Apart from the mobility advantage, our range requires hardware that is significantly more affordable for institutions. Since existing range images depend on specific x86 binaries and architectural features, we present the methodology through which we overcame such challenges as well as preliminary results.

The rise of smart speakers connected to voice-controlled virtual assistants has increased the potential of more elaborate robotic devices to enter personal spaces as evidenced by the number of companies building such products. Of special interest are the so called social robots, which are intended to interact with humans in a manner that resembles more a friendly companion rather than a mere device. We organized controlled, group sessions during which a total of 97 participants of diverse ages and genders interacted with five devices: two smart speakers, two programmable artificially intelligent humanoids, and one social robot. From the analysis of survey data, we report on the opinions of our participants regarding both the usability and security features of these devices, and compare to conclusions from related studies, when applicable. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to look at the user experience with social robots focusing on security and privacy.

Concept maps are graphical representations of the hierarchical relationships among ideas. They are frequently used to assess individual students? understanding in a given domain. We present a methodology to create a collective concept map, which illustrates a group's, not an individual's, understanding of a concept. We draw on data from 15 grades 2-12 teachers and 23 grades 6-11 students from several schools within a metropolitan area in the U.S., who were participants in a summer cybersecurity workshop for beginner learners. Using collective concept maps, we study the initial views on the topic of cybersecurity between teachers and students.

Cybersecurity is a field that has seen its workforce demands rising steadily throughout the past decade. Although the Wisconsin Department of Administration has been actively encouraging collaboration efforts between the public and private sectors and promoting cybersecurity as a promising career path, the demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to be greater than the supply, which is a trend noticed also nationwide. The state of Wisconsin is facing several challenges in attempting to promote cybersecurity including limited security curricula resources, lack of programs and other initiatives that promote security principles, and lack of awareness of cybersecurity risks. In this paper, we discuss the major challenges Wisconsin is facing towards establishing proper cyber hygiene for the general population and growing the cybersecurity work force. In addition, we suggest ways to overcome or lessen the effect of the identified issues.

With the need for geriatric care workers growing faster than can be met, the possibility of socially assistive robots filling this need has garnered increasing attention. This heightened interest in robots as social care workers, however, leads to concerns in detecting possible robot misbehavior. We propose a short questionnaire, based on current elder abuse screening tools, as a method to detect intrusion or misconfiguration in caregiver robots. We focus on misbehavior that can cause psychological or financial harm to the caregiver recipient. We discuss requirements, limitations, and future enhancements.

The ever increasing amount of personal data accumulated by companies offering innovative services through the cloud, Internet of Things devices and, more recently, social robots has started to alert consumers and legislative authorities. In the advent of the first modern laws trying to protect user privacy, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, it is still unclear what are the tools and techniques that the industry should employ to comply with regulations in a transparent and cost effective manner. We propose an architecture for a public blockchain based ledger that can provide strong evidence of policy compliance. To address scalability concerns, we define a new type of off-chain channel that is based on general state channels and offers verification for information external to the blockchain. We also create a model of the business relationships in a smart home setup that includes a social robot and suggest a sticky policy mechanism to monitor cross-boundary policy compliance.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to balance multiple opposing objectives. On one hand, they strive to offer innovative services to obtain competitive advantages; on the other, they have to interconnect with potentially competing ISPs to achieve reachability, and coordinate with them for certain services. The complexity of balancing these objectives is reflected in the diversity of policies of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the standard inter-domain routing protocol. Unforeseen interactions among the BGP policies of different ISPs can cause routing anomalies. In this work, we propose a methodology to allow ISPs to check their BGP policy configurations for guaranteed convergence to a single stable state. This requires that a set of ISPs share their configurations with each other, or with a trusted third party. Compared to previous approaches to BGP safety, we (1) allow ISPs to use a richer set of policies, (2) do not modify the BGP protocol itself, and (3) detect not only instability, but also multiple stable states. Our methodology is based on the extension of current theoretical frameworks to relax their constraints and use incomplete data. We believe that this provides a rigorous foundation for the design and implementation of safety checking tools.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use routing policies to implement the requirements of business contracts, manage traffic, address security concerns and increase scalability of their network. These routing policies are often a high-level expression of strategies or intentions of the ISP. They have meaning when viewed from a network-wide perspective (e.g., mark on ingress, filter on egress). However, configuring these policies for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is undertaken at a low-level, on a per router basis. Unintended routing outcomes have been observed. In this work, we define a language that allows analysis of network-wide configurations at the high-level. This language aims at bridging the gap between router configurations and abstract mathematical models capable of capturing complex policies. The language can be used to verify desired properties of routing protocols and hence detect potential unintended states of BGP. The language is accompanied by a tool suite that parses router configuration languages (which by their nature are vendor-dependent) and translates them into vendor-independent representations of policies.

Routing stability and correctness in the Internet have long been a concern. Despite this, few theoretical frameworks have been proposed to check BGP configurations for convergence and safety. The most popular approach is based on the Stable Paths Problem (SPP) model. Unfortunately, SPP requires enumeration of all possible control-plane paths, which is infeasible in large networks. In this work, we study how to apply algebraic frameworks to the BGP configuration checking problem. We propose an extension of the Stratified Shortest Path Problem (SSPP) model that has a similar expressive power to SPP, but enables more efficient checking of configuration correctness. Our approach remains valid when BGP policies are applied to iBGP sessions - a case which is often overlooked by previous work, although common in today's Internet. While this paper focuses mainly on iBGP problems, our methodology can be extended to eBGP if operators are willing to share their local-preference configurations.

Formally, the Internet inter-domain routing system is a collection of networks, their policies, peering relationships and organizational affiliations, and the addresses they advertize. It also includes components like Internet exchange points. By its very definition, each and every aspect of this system is impacted by BGP, the de-facto standard inter-domain routing protocol. The element of this inter-domain routing system that has attracted the single-most attention within the research community has been the "inter-domain topology". Unfortunately, almost from the get go, the vast majority of studies of this topology, from definition, to measurement, to modeling and analysis, have ignored the central role of BGP in this problem. The legacy is a set of specious findings, unsubstantiated claims, and ill-conceived ideas about the Internet as a whole. By presenting a BGP-focused state-of-the-art treatment of the aspects that are critical for a rigorous study of this inter-domain topology, we demystify in this paper many "controversial" observations reported in the existing literature. At the same time, we illustrate the benefits and richness of new scientific approaches to measuring, modeling, and analyzing the inter-domain topology that are faithful to the BGP-specific nature of this problem domain.