While a Performance Based Education (PBE) conversion process was underway through an NSF grant at TSTC, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an accelerated and sharp turn in the Texas State Technical College hands-on technical model as courses were moved from an in-person to an online modality in the Cybersecurity program.

This brought multiple challenges and lessons learned including instructional content, access, hardware/equipment, software, and communication. This presentation will identify the challenges and solutions implemented for a successful PBE journey.

Deepfake technologies, which allow malicious actors to produce fake images, videos, and audio clips, are reaching an unprecedented convergence of quality, scalability, and ease of use. It will soon be possible to mass-produce highly realistic synthetic content that may be generated and spread faster than fake media detectors can manage. The proliferation of these technologies poses clear threats to society and democracy (for example, consider the dangers of shared videos wherein politicians give fake speeches).

In 2017, six universities (five NCAE-C and one candidate) joined together (“Power of 6”) to establish a pilot program to demonstrate their ability to develop cybersecurity talent pathways for women and underrepresented students for civilian and military positions in the Department of Defense (DoD).

V8 is the open source interpreter developed by Google to enable JavaScript (JS) functionality in Chrome and power other software. Malicious threat actors abuse the usage of JS because most modern-day browsers implicitly trust script code to execute. To aid in incident response and memory forensics in such scenarios, our work introduces the first generalizable account of the memory forensics of the V8 JS engine and provides practitioners with a list of objects and their descriptors extracted from a memory image.

Recent advances in the development of quantum computing hardware have accelerated the interest of preparing information systems for the post-quantum world. Grover’s unstructured search and Shor algorithm for period-finding have potential applications in security, cryptography, and communications in general. We present in this paper the evaluation and simulation of proofs of concepts, gates, and experiments for quantum circuits along with explanations of their potential applications to computing and security.

The growing adoption of zero-trust architectures brings the principle of complete mediation to the forefront of well-designed, secure systems. Despite the potential for zero-trust to improve the security and resilience of systems from cyberattack, practical adoption of these architectures is hindered by lack of sufficiently trustworthy origin authentication within untrusted networks such as the Internet.

Presented here is an overview of CanarySat, which is an open, virtual model of a cube satellite (CubeSat) and a satellite ground station. The goal of this project was to produce a high-fidelity, extensible modeling framework that will allow cybersecurity researchers and satellite designers to investigate cybersecurity solutions targeted specifically at CubeSats and other small satellite platforms.

Hands-on cybersecurity labs are an excellent way to teach cybersecurity and for students to demonstrate knowledge. There is a large body of research on cybersecurity labs that provide examples of excellent lab environments. Due to the use of proprietary software and other factors like significant hardware requirements and large file sizes, it can be difficult to replicate these lab environments. The emergence of low-cost cloud computing resources and the automated deployment of infrastructure using DevOps tools make it easier to share and deploy lab resources.

There is a capacity issue in the educational system preparing cybersecurity experts in this high-demand area: students cannot readily be added to the education system, especially at the Community Colleges level, because trained faculty to accommodate expanded sections are scarce. The weak link in the cybersecurity workforce supply chain is often the inability to find faculty who can be effective and can provide proper encouragement to the students to join the cyber workforce.

We present a novel way to help match employers’ cybersecurity skill requirements with students’ knowledge using a blockchain to assure students’ credentials and records. This approach applies micro-accreditation of topics and rigor scores to students’ courses and associated tasks, making it easier for employers to explore students’ records to verify their success in specific skills. In turn, this allows employers to make better hiring decisions, conferring a solid way for students to prove the quality of their skills.