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Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Placing computer security at the heart of learning Journal Item How to cite: Richards, Mike; Price, Blaine A. and Nuseibeh, Bashar (2008). Placing computer security at the heart of learning. Progress in Informatics, 5(2008) pp. 91–98. For guidance on citations see FAQs . c 2008 National Institute of Informatics Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.2201/NiiPi.2008.5.9 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk

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Page 1: Placing computer security at the heart of learning · Progress in Informatics, No.5, pp.1–8, (2008) 1 Research Paper Placing computer security at the heart of learning Mike RICHARDS1,Blaine

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputs

Placing computer security at the heart of learningJournal ItemHow to cite:

Richards, Mike; Price, Blaine A. and Nuseibeh, Bashar (2008). Placing computer security at the heart oflearning. Progress in Informatics, 5(2008) pp. 91–98.

For guidance on citations see FAQs.

c© 2008 National Institute of Informatics

Version: Version of Record

Link(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.2201/NiiPi.2008.5.9

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.

oro.open.ac.uk

Page 2: Placing computer security at the heart of learning · Progress in Informatics, No.5, pp.1–8, (2008) 1 Research Paper Placing computer security at the heart of learning Mike RICHARDS1,Blaine

Progress in Informatics, No. 5, pp.1–8, (2008) 1

Research Paper

Placing computer security at the heart of learning

Mike RICHARDS1, Blaine A. PRICE2, and Bashar NUSEIBEH3

1,2,3The Open University

ABSTRACTIn this paper we present the approach adopted at the UK’s Open University for teachingcomputer security to large numbers of students at a distance through supported open learn-ing. We discuss how the production of learning materials at the university has had to changeto reflect the ever-increasing rate of technological, legislative and social change within thecomputing discipline, and how the university has had to rethink the role of the academic inthe course development process. We argue that computer security is best taught starting atthe earliest level of undergraduate teaching and continuing through in-depth postgraduatestudy. We discuss our approach which combines the traditional technical aspects of secu-rity with discussions on the professional and ethical issues surrounding security and privacy.This approach presents computer security and privacy in the light of relevant legislative andregulatory regimes, thus the students have a firm grounding in the relevant national and in-ternational laws. We discuss the importance of international standards for information secu-rity risk assessment and management and as well as the relevance of forensic computing to acomputer security curriculum. We conclude with an examination of our course developmentmethodology and argue for a practitioner-led approach to teaching.

KEYWORDSComputer security, computer forensics, computer science education, informatics education, dis-tance teaching

1 IntroductionComputer security is often given little emphasis in

Computer Science teaching. It sometimes appears asan adjunct to a software engineering course or in spe-cialist postgraduate courses. It is conspicuously ab-sent from the Software Engineering Body of Knowl-edge [1] although the most recent ACM curricula rec-ommendations [2] show both security and ethics as hav-ing mandatory courses in all of the computing and soft-ware engineering disciplines. Indeed, a US-based anal-ysis of computing security curricula [6] argues convinc-ingly for wide ranging teaching of security across theundergraduate curriculum. Recent high profile securityfailures in the UK suggest that even the general publicis endorsing greater attention to security. For exam-

Received •• ••, ••; Revised •• ••, ••; Accepted •• ••,••.

ple, the MTAS doctor recruitment system allowed anyInternet user to view personal information about some32,000 applicants including the addresses, home phonenumbers, religion and even sexuality of thousands ofmedical students. A security fault in a tax office al-lowed the financial details of every parent in the UKto be ‘lost’ on CDs. Other projects, including the pro-posed National Identity Register, the National HealthService’s medical records system, and the planned UKroad pricing system have all been heavily criticized bysecurity experts as being unduly intrusive and insecure.

In December 2006, the British government’s Officeof Science and Innovation released an overview [7] ofkey trends in the areas of science and technology be-tween 2015 and 2020. The seventh of eight so-called‘clusters’ was devoted to aspects of security.

A large proportion of the cluster was devoted to the

DOI: 10.2201/NiiPi.2008.5.1

c©2008 National Instiute of Informatics

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2 Progress in Informatics, No. 5, pp.1–8, (2008)

currently-fashionable topic of counter-terrorism, butthe report was concerned with the wider security indus-try. It listed a number of barriers to greater adoption ofsecurity techniques, including:

• Increased concerns over privacy, security andtrust. These will place an even greater importanceon the development of effective systems of gover-nance and of market structure. Increased unau-thorised use of personal data, identification theftand other forms of fraud.

• Lack of public understanding and consequentlysupport if information on and the opportunity fordebate on the use of some technologies and theirapplications is not undertaken.

We believe that this analysis is very relevant to theteaching of computer security, and thus places pub-lic understanding of security high on our curriculumagenda. It is clear that our ethical duty as computer sci-entists is to ensure that current and future practitionersare aware of the important role of security in establish-ing dependable computing systems. At the Open Uni-versity (OU) our mission statement also requires us tobe open in our admission of students and therefore toteach as many as possible at a distance. In this paper,we discuss how the OU is transforming its curriculumto embrace this entire security philosophy.

The Open University (OU) is the largest higher ed-ucation institution in the United Kingdom; more thantwo million people have studied with the OU since itwas formed in 1970. Currently, there are some 150,000undergraduate and 22,000 postgraduate students study-ing with the OU from around the world as well as some9,000 pre-university students and a further 13,000 stu-dents studying OU-validated courses at other institu-tions.

2 Teaching at the open universityUnlike many conventional universities, the OU only

offers distance learning courses. In contrast to someAmerican definitions of distance education (e.g., [8])where the instructor’s oral lectures are broadcast tothe students, the OU develops material internally thatis specifically designed for students who study asyn-chronously at a distance. Many conventional universi-ties now take conventional teaching material and adaptit for the web, but OU teaching material has alwaysbeen written specifically for study at a distance andto optimize the use of available technology. Throughsupported open distance learning, students are not leftalone with the teaching material: more than 7,000 As-sociate Lecturers (ALs) support students directly bytelephone, e-mail, wiki, online forum, and ‘face to face’

tutorials.Almost all OU students are online with approxi-

mately 300 courses using e-learning technology to agreater or lesser extent. Online activities include elec-tronic discussion boards, shared forums, wikis, pod-casting and an electronic assignment submission sys-tem. Individual courses have annual populations thatrange from a few hundred students to several thousand;this allows the university to make a large investment inhigh quality courses and amortize the cost over manystudents for many years.

2.1 Traditional course developmentThe traditional OU course or module development

methods have involved gathering a team of academics,technical support staff, and specialists such as edi-tors, graphical designers, and software developers, whowork on the production of custom course texts, soft-ware, multimedia material and assessment. In somecourses this has involved building custom software de-velopment environments [3] or simulations. [4] Thesemethods have proved successful over more than 30years in teaching very large numbers of students at adistance: a very large investment is made in the produc-tion of a course (some introductory courses cost morethan GBP 1 Million to produce) and the cost is amor-tized over many students over many years. The devel-opment time for such courses is between 2 and 3 years,which raises particular problems in a fast evolving sub-ject such as computing where the cost cannot be amor-tized over a long period.

Once completed, a course’s lifetime can be as long asten years. Courses are revised during their lifetime, butthe expense of reprinting non-digital materials is suchthat rewrites cannot occur more often than every 2-4years. This presents special problems for teaching com-puting in general and security in particular.

2.2 Responsive course developmentIt is clear that relatively slow moving disciplines such

as history, philosophy, or mathematics can cope withthe traditional methodology more readily than a subjectsuch as computing; but it is wholly inadequate for cer-tain specialist areas such as computer security whichare driven by fast moving developments in technology,society, and legislation. Quinn et al. [5] describe theOU Software Engineering curriculum in detail, includ-ing some course development methods. Here we de-scribe two different methods to address the problem oftimeliness in developing teaching materials

For our postgraduate Information Security Manage-ment course we used a relatively simple method ofincreasing the rate of course development by wrap-ping Open University teaching materials and assess-

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Placing computer security at the heart of learning 3

ment around a published book based on an internationalstandards document. This allowed us to use a smallacademic team who concentrated on developing teach-ing material that would support the concepts containedwithin the book.

The shortcoming of this approach is that it relies onthe availability of suitable reference material, whichmay not always exist in emerging topics. An exam-ple of this problem can be found in the emerging areaof forensic computing which is only now starting to ap-pear in standard computing texts and curricula. Withcomputing technology being involved in every aspect ofbusiness life, it is clear that the importance of forensiccomputing to employers and to law enforcement willcontinue to increase into the foreseeable future. TheOU foresees a growing market for trained forensic an-alysts and has to include the topic within our curricu-lum. A new model of course development is being em-ployed emphasizing professional expertise, relevance,and speed. Rather than relying purely on academicskills, we are building course teams around external ex-perts and practitioners, producing directly relevant andtimely courses well suited to the market.

The forensic computing course is being developedwith substantial input from practitioners. The courseteams comprise an external author who is an activepractitioner regularly giving expert testimony in casesof terrorism, murder, conspiracy, and corporate espi-onage. A second industry practitioner has been em-ployed to produce assessment materials including sce-narios and realistic forensic materials. The course teamadditionally consists of an academic who is responsi-ble for academic editing and coordinating the externalpractitioners, a course manager who coordinates withthe wider university systems, and a publishing editorwho guarantees quality.

Producing distance teaching material that is bothhigh quality and up-to-date is clearly a challenge. Al-though these responsive methods are proving success-ful when compared with previous methods, we are con-stantly exploring new ways of improving quality with-out sacrificing speed of delivery as we discuss in thepenultimate section. In the next sections we describehow security fits into our curriculum.

3 An early introduction to computer se-curity

Our entry-level undergraduate course is called Data,Computing and Information (M150) and it covers alarge number of subjects including the development ofthe modern networked computer, programming and thetransformation of data into useful information. Thecourse has proved to be immensely successful, attract-ing approximately 4,000 students each year; most of

whom are new to the OU and to computing.M150 was designed to teach a large amount of ‘foun-

dation’ material — basic concepts that are unlikely tochange within the lifetime of the course. Therefore, thecourse is dominated by very high-quality printed mate-rial whose high costs are defrayed by large print runsand obvious appeal to novice students.

A considerable part of M150 is devoted to a discus-sion of security and privacy. Issues of security and pri-vacy are raised throughout the course, especially wherestudents may be learning about the acquisition, process-ing and storage of personal or financial information.These two topics are explored in great detail in a pairof course units (sections); each taking approximatelytwo weeks to study.

‘Hiding data : an introduction to security’ is de-signed as a primer to a large number of security issues.Students are first introduced to a number of real-worldcases where individual or corporate privacy or securityhave been compromised; including examples of iden-tity theft, financial fraud and hacking.

Students then explore how computer professionalsattempt to protect information. Encryption is exploredfrom its historical origins through to the modern era,with particular emphasis on the race between codemakers and code breakers. During this part of thecourse, students use a web-based environment to ex-periment with a number of code breaking techniqueswhere they break historical codes including homo-phonic ciphers and the once-impregnable Vigenere Ci-pher (Fig. 1).

The section of the course concludes with a discussionof the limitations of encryption and how data can becompromised through social engineering. Students willrealise that security is not solely a technological issue,but one with a great number of human factors.

These factors are explored in greater detail in thefollowing section; ‘Too Many Secrets’; which is con-cerned with the social and ethical issues raised in se-curing information. The unit considers the tensions be-tween freedom of expression and the free exchange ofideas and the need of society to restrict such rights. Stu-dents are shown the consequences of unrestricted infor-mation exchange in the form of surveillance and piracyand then explore the various techniques used to keepinformation private; such as digital rights managementand intellectual property legislation.

This unit has proved to be a valuable tool in assessingstudents; the subject is open-ended and changing veryrapidly under technological and legislative pressuresand has allowed the course team to set assessment oncontemporary issues including music downloads, RFIDand the proposed UK biometric identity cards. Studentsare asked to gather information about the topic and lay

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Fig. 1 M150 students exploring the Vigenere cipher. At the left, the student is introduced to the working of the cipher, atright they use a simulator to replicate Charles Babbage’s original code-breaking technique.

out arguments for and against the subject, then to givetheir own opinion. Students are assessed not only onthe technical content of their answers, but also their useof referenced sources from the Internet or libraries, andalso the manner in which they express their opinions.

We have observed that the majority of M150 studentsexpress strong, coherent opinions about these subjectswhich they do not regard as abstract concepts, but asmatters of direct concern to their everyday lives. M150students are not studying a subject in isolation; ratherthey are using knowledge garnered from the course tomake judgements about much larger issues.

Our experience has shown that the basics of privacyand security, including ethical and legislative issues,can be taught to inexperienced students and that theyprove to be exciting subjects capable of engaging stu-dents whose interests lie beyond the scope of traditionalcomputer science. It has also shown us that there is aclear demand for further undergraduate courses in thefields of privacy and security in later years of study.

Ironically, it is these two units that expose the weak-nesses of the traditional OU course model. Althoughthe course has been presented openly for a few years,many of the concepts discussed in these units have beensuperseded by technological, commercial, and legisla-tive developments. As a consequence, the course iscurrently undergoing an expensive rewrite to bring theunits up to date.

4 Postgraduate computer securityAlthough we have considerable demand for com-

puter security teaching at undergraduate level, our cur-rent focus is on postgraduate computing courses withsome input from the undergraduate law curriculum.All of our courses include coverage of relevant profes-sional issues, many of which relate to computer securityand privacy. We now discuss the contributions of two

security-specific courses to our computing curriculum:Information Security Management (M886) and Foren-sic Computing & Investigations (M889). These coursesform an introduction to the subjects and based on the re-sults of our evaluations (see section 5) we plan to intro-duce a postgraduate certificate, diploma, and specialistMSc in security and IT Law.

4.1 M886: Information security managementThis course focuses on developing the student’s abil-

ity to analyze information security risks to an organi-zation. It was developed in recognition of the fact thatthe protection of information assets underpins the com-mercial viability and profitability of all enterprises andthe effectiveness of public sector organisations. M886provides an overview of information security and a de-tailed, practical understanding of selected aspects, in-cluding IT governance and information security riskanalysis and management.

M886 uses a practice-based approach where studentsinvestigate security management inside a familiar or-ganisation (such as their employer). The teaching isgeared to provide the knowledge, understanding andanalysis needed to develop a practical information se-curity management system, based on standards set bythe British standards BS ISO/IEC 17799:2000 & BS7799.

M886 is divided into three sections:1. An introduction to information security—this unit

discusses the current requirements on, and incen-tives for organisations to implement informationsecurity. Students then progress on to the pro-cess of identifying and valuing information as anorganisational asset. The protection of informa-tion assets is the subject of the British standards,around which the course is based. This unit out-lines the processes that must be gone through to

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Fig. 2 Left: image of CD in official evidence bag as delivered to students, Right: screen image of Access Data ForensicToolkit as used by students for assessment.

satisfy the requirements of the standards.2. Information security risk assessment—This unit

places in context the issues involved in informa-tion security risk assessment, as required by thestandard. Students examine the risks that mayarise in all relevant aspects of an organisation’soperations, including human factors, ecommerce,web-services, and systems development. Theylearn how to conduct a systematic risk assessmentthat leads to a prioritised list of information secu-rity risks for an organisation, and the requirementsfor their treatment. The unit concludes with an ex-ercise during which students conduct a risk assess-ment for a chosen organisation, using informationcontained within the British standards and the setbook.

3. Information security risk management—by theend of this unit, the student will have completedthe development of a fit-for-purpose informationsecurity management system through the manage-ment of information security risks. They willhave learned to be systematic in the choice ofcontrols that treat specific risks, and how to doc-ument their systems in accordance with Britishstandards. There is a full discussion of the tech-nologies that underpin the standard’s controls, andthe unit finishes by considering the topic of plan-ning for when things do go wrong.

The remainder of the course requires students to con-duct a piece of independent research into an issue in in-formation security management for a real organization,analysing and evaluating the results of their research forpresentation in the final examination.

4.2 M889: Computer forensics and investigationsOur most recent course, Forensic Computing and In-

vestigations (M889), is unique in our curriculum in thatit addresses professional and legal issues in depth inaddition to the technical curriculum. Several weeksof study are devoted to understanding the role of theforensic computing investigator, what evidence is ad-missible in both civil and criminal proceedings, andwhich laws protect the privacy of individuals. After 8weeks of study, the student should have a thorough un-derstanding of which British, European or Internationallaws govern how they may perform an investigation aswell as knowing whether or not a matter is for the civilor criminal courts. Students should understand wheretheir duties lie as both computer security professionalsand as responsible citizens.

Most of the remaining weeks of study are devotedto the technical aspects of various forms of forensiccomputing investigations, including live and dead diskforensics as well as Internet and network forensics. Stu-dents learn the basics of media recovery and disk imag-ing, what kind of forensic artifacts are left behind bye-mail, web browsing and normal computer use. Weintroduce students to the basic features of a profes-sional disk image analysis package. Then we presentthem with an evidence bag containing a CD and a setof instructions from a “customer” who suspects an em-ployee of wrong-doing. Students then follow the foren-sically sound procedures they have been taught to ana-lyze the data and produce a report suitable for manage-ment and legal briefing. Figure 2 shows examples ofthe evidence and the analysis program.

This course concludes with two important topics: anintroduction to forensic computing research method-

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ologies (including current literature on the subject) andthe development of a Forensic Readiness Program foran organization. The goals here are to ensure that stu-dents are able to keep themselves up to date by findingand analyzing the relevant literature. More importantly,they should be able to analyze a new proposed method-ology and discuss whether or not it is valid or applica-ble for a given situation. By developing and analyzing aForensic Readiness Program for a real organization, thestudent is able to demonstrate practical skills in a real-world setting, as opposed to the artificial assessmentsoften set for students.

The over-arching theme of both of our postgraduatesecurity courses is that material is practitioner-led andrelated to the real-world as much as possible. Althoughwe do make use of case studies in our teaching, ourassessment emphasizes the application of techniques toreal businesses and organizations in order ensure thatstudents are able to transfer their learning beyond theacademic realm.

5 EvaluationQuality control has helped ensure that the OU has

been rated the top UK university for student satisfac-tion [9] for each of the last three years. All teachingand evaluation materials are internally assessed by aca-demic members of staff at all stages of preparation.Course materials can also be passed to ’developmen-tal testers’ during the development process; these arerepresentative members of the student community whoare able to provide feedback on the clarity and use oflanguage as well as the difficulty of the material.

An academic external to the OU is a member of eachcourse team and reviews all teaching and assessmentmaterials as well as sitting on the ’award board’ whichactually issues the final student grades. The externalacademic is expected to write a review of the course foreach presentation, listing any concerns they might havewith the course. These issues must be addressed by thecourse team as part of their duties.

Finally, the OU’s Institute for Educational Technol-ogy (IET) poll students at the end of courses. These aredetailed surveys covering every aspect of the course in-cluding quality of materials, tuition, difficulty and thegeneral student experience. More specific surveys areconducted on new courses with the intention of identi-fying specific problems with novel materials or teach-ing methods. Students can complete either a printedsurvey or complete the poll over the Internet with some60% of students returning some or all of their sur-vey. The aggregated results of the survey are pre-sented to course teams with the intention that any nec-essary changes can be made - either when materials arereprinted, or by providing additional teaching materials

to the associate lecturers.

6 New developments in teachingIn this section we look at innovations currently under

way (but not yet evaluated) for improving the teachingof these subjects and sharing teaching experience andmaterials among institutions.

6.1 OpenLearn: Open source courses and teachingtools

Part of the mission statement of the Open Universityis to promote both educational opportunity and socialjustice worldwide. One aspect of this is OpenLearn(www.open.ac.uk/openlearn), a two-part $10 millionopen content project. The LearningSpace part of Open-Learn aims to make more than 5400 hours of OU highquality learning curriculum freely available worldwidefor anyone to study or re-use. The LabSpace is a vir-tual area that encourages a community of practise to de-velop around the sharing and re-using of the resourcesfound in the LearningSpace. Educational and profes-sional practitioners and more adventurous learners candownload materials, reversion them for their own pur-poses and upload the amended materials to the Lab-space. Following a formal peer review these couldthen be fed through into the LearningSpace, providinga richer and broader set of resources. The OU has alsoadopted the open source Virtual Learning Environment(VLE) Moodle (www.moodle.org) to deliver content tostudents and to provide innovations in VLE which arefed back to the worldwide community.

6.2 Hybrid course developmentWe have recognised that the traditional course de-

velopment model cannot be expected to produce timelyand relevant material, and have therefore embarked on anovel course development model. The new course con-sists of three large blocks of material, each of whichis introduced and concluded with high quality printedcourse units representing perhaps one third of the totallearning material. These units will contain material rel-atively immune to change such as basic concepts anddiscussions of social importance. Since these units willremain unchanged for a number of years, they will begenerated using the traditional production methods andpresented as glossy, high-value booklets.

The remainder of the units will be delivered online,with each unit being made up from short ‘articles’ muchlike a magazine. Articles can be tagged and commentedby students, although their contents cannot be changed.Web delivery allows for faster, cheaper, more flexibledevelopment and presentation of timely material. Shortarticles are easier to replace as they become outdated, orprove to be unpopular with students or unduly difficult,

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ensuring that the course remains relevant for longer.The articles also allow us to widen the course team toalmost anyone—not just the team developing the newcourse, but fellow academics both inside our own de-partment and in the wider university. We also intend topresent articles written by researchers in the field fromoutside the OU, including practitioners.

7 SummaryAt the OU we consider security to be a fundamental

computing issue, so much so that if a student only com-pletes an introductory course in computer science theywill have a comprehension of its importance, scope, andapplicability to their lives. Those students who chooseto continue studying computing will encounter manydifferent aspects of security throughout the curriculum,allowing them to comprehend its complexity and diver-sity.

Security is a high value skill in a globalized market.Software and hardware businesses will have an increas-ing need for in house security skills at all levels in yearsto come, as low level skills such as programming andcustomer support are outsourced. The rate of changecontinues to increase and traditional university teach-ing methods cannot be expected to keep pace. Conse-quently we are increasingly utilizing a practitioner-ledcourse development model to produce relevant, timelyteaching, using real-world examples for assessment.

By sharing our experience, course content and toolsthrough open content and open source initiatives, theOpen University is enabling educators and profession-als to collaborate in the development and deployment ofnovel teaching and technologies such as security. Ourultimate ambition should be to create a world class freeresource accessible to anyone.

References[1] www.swebok.org [Accessed 28 November 2007]

[2] www.acm.org/education/curricula.html [Accessed2007-11-28]

[3] B. Bogolea and K. Wijekumar, “Information securitycurriculum creation: a case study,” In Proceedings ofthe 1st Annual Conference on information Security Cur-riculum Development (Kennesaw, Georgia, October 08–08, 2004). InfoSecCD’04. ACM, New York, NY, 59–65.DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1059524.1059537

[4] http://www.foresight.gov.uk/HORIZON SCANNINGCENTRE/Reports/S-TClusters/S T clusters security-doc.pdf [Accessed 2007-11-28]

[5] H.J.C. Ellis Software engineering at a distance. Pro-ceedings of the 1998 International Conference on Soft-ware Engineering, 23–24 (1998).

[6] M. Woodman, R. Griffiths, M. Macgregor and S. Hol-land, OU LearningWorks: a customized programming

environment for Smalltalk modules. Proceedings of the1999 International Conference on Software Engineer-ing, 638–641 (1999).

[7] H. Sharp and P. Hall An interactive multimedia soft-ware house simulation forpostgraduate software engi-neers. Proceedings of the 2000 International Conferenceon Software Engineering, 688–691 (2000).

[8] B. Quinn, L. Barroca, B. Nuseibeh, J. Fernandez-Ramil,L. Rapanotti, P. Thomas, and M. Wermelinger LearningSoftware Engineering at a Distance. IEEE Software vol.23, no. 6, pp. 36–43 (2006).

[9] http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/nss/ [Accessed 2007-11-28]

Mike RICHARDSMike RICHARDS is a Lecturer inComputing at The Open University,UK. He was awarded the BSc in Ge-ology from the University College ofWales, Aberystwyth, UK, in 1988 theMaster of Science in Computer Sci-

ence from the University of Wales in 1990. In 1996he joined the Open University to help launch the largescale Internet teaching programme for Computer Sci-ence. His research interests include privacy and se-curity in ubiquitous computing. His teaching subjectsinclude introductory computing, artificial intelligenceand information security.

Blaine PRICEBlaine PRICE is a Lecturer in Com-puting at The Open University. Hehas undergraduate degrees in bothMathematics and Computing & In-formation Science from Queen’s Uni-versity at Kingston, Canada. He was

awarded the Master of Science in Computer Sciencefrom the University of Toronto in 1991 when he joinedthe Open University. He is largely responsible for theOpen University’s early work in large scale teaching viathe Internet. His research areas include security andprivacy in ubiquitous computing. He chairs the MSc inComputing and conducts both research and teaching inthe areas of forensic computing and IT law.

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Bashar NUSEIBEHBashar NUSEIBEH is Professor andDirector of Research in Computing atThe Open University, and a VisitingProfessor at Imperial College Londonand the National Institute of Infor-matics, Japan. His research interests

are in software requirements engineering and design,particularly applied to the development of dependable,mission-critical systems. Professor Nuseibeh is Editor-in-Chief of the Automated Software Engineering Jour-nal, Chair of IFIP Working Group 2.9 on RequirementsEngineering, and Chair of the Steering Committee ofthe International Conference on Software Engineering.He received a number of research and service awards,and is an Automated Software Engineering Fellow, aFellow of the British Computer Society and the Institu-tion of Engineering and Technology, and is a CharteredEngineer.