IT Security Research and Education in Synergy

This paper presents experience from laboratory projects performed by students in Applied Computer Security, a course given at Chalmers University of Technology. From this, we conclude that the combination of security research and education results in a synergy that can be very beneficial to both fields. The paper describes in detail three different types of laboratory projects: intrusion experiments, intrusion analysis and remediation, and intrusion detection. Furthermore, we discuss the outcome and impact of the student projects with respect to education, research, and synergy between the two, as well as ethical issues. Among the benefits of the close connection between research and education in the projects, we find that the students were very motivated by this research connection and that they produced unique research data with natural diversity. The author is also with the Department of Computer Science, Karlstad University, SE-651 88 Karlstad, Sweden. 2 Stefan Lindskog, Ulf Lindqvist, and Erland Jonsson