Interactive Framework for Cybersecurity Education and Future Workforce Development

This research-to-practice paper presents a novel pedagogical tool for hardware cybersecurity education and workforce development. The growing importance of hardware security has made it essential for individuals and organizations to understand hardware security principles and best practices. However, the current educational curriculum falls short of fulfilling these emerging demands due to the rapidly changing hardware security landscape and limited opportunities for hands-on training. To address these challenges, we propose and have developed the Interactive Hardware and Cybersecurity (I-HaC) Educational Framework, a pedagogical educational framework that supplements existing courses by leveraging generative AI for individualized instruction related to hardware and cybersecurity, data mining, and applied Machine Learning (ML), as well as data visualization to enhance cybersecurity education and workforce development. The framework is designed to be utilized by graduate and undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS) students for a comprehensive introduction to cybersecurity exploits and countermeasures in an interactive manner with hands-on components. Using I-HaC, we have developed tailored lab components for a diverse range of students and intend to release I-HaC as open-source for the benefit of the ECE and CS education community.