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Teaching cryptography is essential in undergraduate information assurance (IA) education as it is an indispensable component in the IA knowledge domain and plays a key role in ensuring information confidentiality, integrity and availability. Hands-on method in cryptography is a good approach to achieve this as it engages students in real-world settings, which will inspire creativity of students and train them to adapt cryptographic solutions to emerging areas. We design a collection of labs which allow students to gain hands-on experiences with cryptographic algorithms, especially increasing student awareness of possible threats and attacks to various cryptographic techniques. The developed hands-on exercises tied with each cryptography topic teach students both cryptographic algorithm and vulnerabilities. In each exercise students experience cryptographic techniques and its possible threats and attacks. In other words, students learn and understand both strength and weakness of each cryptography technique. Our labs cover topics of encryption, digital signature, key management, etc. These labs can be "plugged" into courses at different levels from CS1 to senior courses such as network security, security management, etc. Our approach enriches experiential learning materials in cryptography. Our effort contributes to cryptography courseware development and IA education in terms of hands-on exercises. The hands-on labs can be adopted in various levels of undergraduate Computer Science (CS) and IA courses. Hands-on labs are available at http://cryptolabs.info/. |
