Using An Instructional Operating System In Teaching Computer Security Courses

To address national needs for computer security education, many universities have incorporated computer and security courses into their undergraduate and graduate curricula. In these courses, students learn how to design, implement, analyze, test, and operate a system or a network to achieve security. Pedagogical research has shown that effective laboratory exercises are critically important to the success of this type of courses. However, such effective laboratories do not exist in computer security education. To fill this gap, we have developed an instructional operating system SMinix based on the instructional OS (Minix) developed for operating system and network courses. We use SMinix as a basic framework, and build laboratory exercises on top of the framework; each exercise requires students to add a different security mechanism into the system. The instructional system is designed in such a way that makes it easy for students to focus on the part of the system that are related to the security concepts covered in our classes. The similar approach has proved to be effective in teaching operating system and network courses, but it has not yet been used in teaching computer security courses. We have already used SMinix for our Computer Security course, students have demonstrated great interests in our laboratory exercises.