The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that was established in 1950 by Congress to support science and engineering efforts nationwide. NSF distributes federal funding among scientists to support their research and development initiatives promoting progress in science, advancing national health, prosperity and welfare and national defense. NSF Program Directors (PDs) ensure that proposals are reviewed in a fair, competitive, transparent, and thorough manner, supporting scientists and educators throughout the submission process. A common misconception is that it is difficult and inadvisable to contact NSF Program Directors during any stage of proposal submission, whether before or after submission. This misconception leads some faculty members to avoid discussing their ideas with Program Directors, thereby missing opportunities to advance their proposals effectively. As a former faculty member and now a Program Director, the presenter aims to clarify some of these common misconceptions or generate greater awareness by posing and answering a few not-so-frequently-asked-questions (FAQ)s for engaging with PDs. The session aims to empower educators to engage meaningfully with NSF Program Directors about funding ideas, bringing them one step closer to successful grant writing in support of their academic endeavors.

The everlasting fight between security researchers and ransomware authors, including cyber criminals who leverage ransomware to cripple organizations worldwide, has continued to evolve as novel techniques are used to evade ransomware detection. The victim not only endures paramount financial loss from business downtime for several days and/or paying ransom to regain control of their environment but also becomes at risk of being exposed to the stolen digital assets out on the Internet. To tackle these threats against ransomware, our research project aims to identify (1) structural similarities among 2,436 cryptographic Windows ransomware samples per calendar year between 2017 and 2021 and (2) structural dissimilarities against 3,014 benign applications using machine learning classifiers. We base our analysis on PE metadata for similarity analysis and binary classification tasks. With the Cosine Index, we capture 71% – 87.80% and 66% – 82.30% of similarities based on imports and function names feature spaces, respectively. On the other hand, after designing four experimental settings, Random Forest outperforms other applied classifiers by achieving 91.75%, 91.99%, 90.47%, and 91.05% at best for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores, respectively, for ransomware detection.

Current systems for tracking agricultural products from their origination to consumption rely on manual handling by separate actors involved in the enterprise infrastructures. This makes any kind of tracing of concerns back to their sources very cumbersome and challenging. It also raises concerns for potential security risks such as data integrity and accountability. In this work, we propose the use of blockchain to reliably process agricultural data in a decentralized manner and use IoT devices for automated data capture and tracking. Our blockchain based approach offers a manageable semi-automated solution to track and trace agricultural products to ensure integrity and accountability of all stakeholders involved.

The field of cybersecurity is becoming very dynamic, and needs continuous evolution. This requires not only the formal and informal education, but a security mindset to be developed for our future workforce. This panel elaborates on some such aspects.

The critical shortage of cyber security professionals remains an unsolved problem. We need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching in cybersecurity in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years. As faculty we need to integrate them into our courses. Having a more unified environment and contributing to each other's educational projects will help. By bringing together new and experienced faculty we can build a community to engage in this work. We need to develop a critical mass of faculty, asking each other what we want from this learning community. As a learning community we can provide support for new members to learn about resources and help each other. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts. The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for from the community?"

Since security education is not required in CS curriculum, many CS undergraduates can successfully achieve their degree without being exposed to any security courses during their course of study and enter the digital workforce with no knowledge or basic understanding of information security -- one of the essential skill sets for the 21st century. To address this concern, Information Assurance and Security (IAS) has been designated as a new knowledge area in the new ACM/IEEE-CS Curricula 2013. This workshop empowers CS faculty to access and use freely available resources to integrate security in to their CS curriculum will help institutions to meet ACM/IEEE-CS guideline. With support from NSF (Award# DUE-1140864, #1438861), at the CyberSecurity Education, Research and Outreach Center at Tennessee Tech, we have developed a set of readily available resources called SecKnitKit (Security Knitting Kit, www.secknitkit.org), which offers a suite of instructional material for non-security faculty (faculty whose primary teaching/research focus is not security) to integrate security in upper division CS courses such as operating systems, software engineering, computer networks and databases. Resources include lecture slides with notes, assessment questions and homework/classroom assignments with all details and technical support. The participants will receive access to all SecKnitKit materials (instructional and assessment) of interest and demonstrated use of the active learning exercises. There are six participant slots for each of the four courses mentioned above and participants will have an option to select their courses of choice at registration time.

We need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching cybersecurity using hands-on exercises. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years so that faculty need to choose those that can best be integrated into their courses. As a community, we can contribute to each other/s projects. We would like to bring together both new and experienced faculty to build community. Our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/TeachingCyber/) allows us to work together outside of SIGCSE events, and we are developing a critical mass of users. In the BoF, participants can sign up for the closed group. Participants will discuss answers to specific questions on teaching security. One goal of our BoF is to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts, including our own (e.g. Security Injections, the Security Knitting Kit project, and EDURange). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses. The questions we will ask are, What materials and exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? How do we expand and improve cybersecurity education?

In order to meet the cybersecurity workforce demand, it is important to raise cybersecurity interest among the youth. Just like ACM programming competitions, Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions allow students to learn cybersecurity skills in a fun and engaging way. It is an effective platform to increase students' interest in cybersecurity and prepare them for defending against real cyber attackers. A typical CTF competition requires at least some basic technical security knowledge and months of diligent preparation. For this very reason, many computer science students do not feel qualified to participate in CTF competitions, and as a result, do not even try. To overcome this lack of confidence while at the same time raising awareness about the cybersecurity profession in a realistic fashion, we have developed the CTF Unplugged project, as inspired by the CS Unplugged project. The primary goal is to teach students with little or no technical knowledge about the different cybersecurity challenges that a cybersecurity professional must address and the problem-solving skills needed for a cybersecurity career, all without direct use of technology. The effectiveness of CTF unplugged project has been evaluated after exposing 36 high school students participating in the Tennessee Tech University GenCyber Camp to these activities this past summer. Students reported a significant gain in knowledge, confidence and comfort level after participation.

We have been teaching cybersecurity using hands-on, interactive exercises that have successfully engaged students. However, in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals, we need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching in this area. We would like to bring together new and experienced faculty to do this. Ambareen Siraj has set up a dedicated Facebook group to allow us to work together outside of SIGCSE events, but we need to develop a critical mass of users. During the BoF, we will encourage participants to sign up for the closed group, and we will have an exercise where they ask and answer questions about what they want from this learning community. One benefit of having a learning community is that it will be easier to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts, including our own (e.g. Security Injections, the Security Knitting Kit project, and EDURange). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. For the last five years, we have been doing that at SIGCSE. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for from the community?"

Every year, companies are searching for professionals in cybersecurity more than ever before; however, there is a big void in the pipeline. Interestingly enough, the largest source of security incidents are unintentional insiders, which demonstrates the need for cybersecurity education not only for developing cybersecurity workforce but also to raise mere awareness and consciousness about these issues among general users of technology. It has been surveyed that 87% of American teenagers, ages 13-17, have been reported to have or have access to a desktop or laptop computer The goal of this project is to seed interest in cybersecurity by educating the youth about cybersecurity related concepts and safe online practices through the fun, simplistic visual form of comics.

We see teaching cybersecurity through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. However, we also want to assess how much students are learning from these exercises, and the exercises themselves could be used to assess what students know. Creating new hands-on exercises requires significant preparation on the part of the instructor. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is two-fold: 1) to continue to bring together instructors who have developed hands-on exercises with those who would like to use them, and 2) extend the discussion to include assessment of student learning. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering, algorithms and programming (CS0, CS1, CS2). The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for? What are the learning goals for your students? How do you assess them?"

Information Assurance and Security has been designated as a new knowledge area in the new ACM/IEEE-CS Curricula 2013. This is not a trivial task to accomplish, especially with lack of resources. With support from NSF (Award# DUE-1140864), we have developed a set of readily available resources called SecKnitKit (Security Knitting Kit, www.secknitkit.org), which offers a suite of instructional material for non-security faculty (faculty whose primary teaching/research focus is not security) to integrate security in upper division CS courses such as operating systems, software engineering, computer networks and databases. As part of the NSF CReST (CyberWorkshops: Resources and Strategies for Teaching Cybersecurity in Computer Science, DUE-1438861, www.crest4cs.org) project, this workshop will introduce CS faculty to the SecKnitKit resources that can be easily adaptable into any standard CS curriculum. The participants will receive access to all SecKnitKit materials (instructional and assessment) of interest and demonstrated use of the active learning exercises. Each participant will receive $125.00 stipend for his/her time. Requires a Windows or Mac laptop. Enrollment is limited to 28 participants who teach at least one of these courses: operating systems, software engineering, computer networks and databases).

Wireless communication capabilities of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been utilized in various cutting-edge applications such as Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs). One of the benefits of VSNs is sharing of common-interest information among vehicle drivers. Drivers may benefit from identifying neighbors that have interest common with them along with the extent of their interest. However, there are some privacy issues that should be addressed. Revealing the nature and degree of interests (DOI) of drivers can be in violation of their privacy. In this paper, we propose an efficient chatting scheme among drivers that preserves such privacy. We use attribute based encryption (ABE) technique for anonymous common interest verification and homomorphic encryption technique for anonymous DOI verification. Moreover, we propose an efficient search mechanism to enable vehicles to check if they have common interests with low computation and communication overhead. To secure conversation, a key agreement protocol is used to enable the drivers that have the same interest and the desired DOI to establish a shared secret key. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that our scheme can successfully preserve drivers' privacy with low communication and computation overhead.

The electrical grid is transitioning to new smart grid technology. With smart meters becoming an essential feature in smart homes, concerns regarding smart meters and the vast amount of consumer data that it captures are on the rise. While access to this fine-grained energy consumption data captured by smart meters can potentially violate consumer privacy, advanced analysis of this data can help to protect the interest of both the consumer and the utility company by enabling fraud detection at either end. The use of machine learning techniques has been a very common approach to energy fraud detection. Patterns in energy consumption can be recognized and used to detect anomalous behavior. This research reports on a novel application of decision tree learning technique to profile normal energy consumption behavior allowing for the detection of potentially fraudulent activity.

We see teaching cybersecurity through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. Some of the exercises that we have seen require significant preparation on the part of the instructor. Having a community makes it easier to share exercises, knowing what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is to bring together instructors who have developed hands-on exercises, those who have used them and those who would like to. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering, algorithms and programming. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for?"

Security illiteracy is a very common problem among Computer Science (CS) graduates entering the nation's digital workforce, which has contributed to a national cyber-infrastructure that could and should be more resilient to cyber-enemies than it is now. The Security Knitting Kit (SecKnitKit) project aims to improve security awareness, knowledge, and interest of undergraduate CS students by exposing them to computer security concepts and issues in their regular course of study. The project is developing, deploying, and disseminating a multi-faceted out-of-the-box instructional support system to empower non-security faculty. These are faculty who have no experience in teaching security but recognize the importance of security in today's world and want to broaden their teaching repertoire. This project enables them to weave relevant security topics traditional computer science courses seamlessly and effectively. The project is organized by the CS department at Tennessee Tech University (TTU) and supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DUE-1140864.

We describe a new annual awards program, the Rising Renaissance Engineer Spectrum Awards, which recognizes a diverse body of students across all engineering departments at our institution for their initiatives and achievements in educational, research, and professional development activities. This award is unique at our institution because it is inclusively for students from all six engineering departments and specifically promotes underrepresented groups. This awards program complements existing engineering awards honoring faculty, staff, and alumni for their research, teaching, and service. It is modeled after the NCWIT (National Center for Women in Information Technology) Aspirations in Computing Award, which has successfully encouraged many female high school students to persist in computing careers. With the Computer Science Department spearheading the effort, this project is a collaborative partnership among representatives from all engineering departments.

In today's world, it is critical that our students get exposure to security education as part of their Computer Science (CS) curriculum. The lack of security consciousness in digital workforce is costing businesses, government, and citizens severely every year. A significant reason behind this problem stems from the fact that the majority of higher education institutions do not have adequate resources to educate CS students in information assurance (IA) and security. While security is not required in the current CS curriculum, IA has been designated as a knowledge area in the proposed ACM/IEEE-CS CS Curricula 2013. Also, the absence of security topics in core CS subject matters not only leaves students security oblivious, but also prevents higher education institutions from applying for National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education Programs (CAE/IAE) accreditation, which provides access to government scholarships and grants. In this session, we will discuss challenges CS faculty face in integrating security topics in traditional CS courses and call attention to existing government funded supports that faculty can leverage in doing so. To share ideas and resources, we hope to bring together security educators who are active in this field with a community of CS educators who may not have any background in teaching security but recognize the need for it and are interested in teaching security topics as part of their regular course curriculum.

In this paper, we describe the Tennessee Technological University (TTU) Tapestry Workshop for high school (HS) teachers. The Tapestry Workshop initiative - a collaborative partnership between TTU, the University of Virginia (UVA) and HS teachers - shares strategies, practices, and innovative ideas for teaching Computer Science (CS) effectively. This three-day professional development workshop utilized informational, technical, networking, activity-, and discussion-oriented sessions geared towards attracting and engaging a diverse body of CS students. The workshop was a worthwhile professional development activity for both the organizers and attendees and contributed to the initiation of a local HS CS program.