A Scalable Platform Improving Students Cybersecurity Mindset.

Recent years have witnessed a strong demand for cybersecurity professionals. The latest ABET accreditation guideline also lists cybersecurity as a required component in computer science curricula. Given the strong demand and accreditation requirement, it is important that the cybersecurity component, secure coding practices, can be well supported in computer science courses. Considering the importance of hands-on learning in cybersecurity education, and the established workflow of many computer science instructors in automatic grading of programming assignments, it will be the best of their interest if there is a tool that can seamlessly integrate cybersecurity hands-on learning into their existing auto grading workflow. In this work, we present CSEC, a platform for supporting CS students secure coding practices and improving their cybersecurity mindset. For instructors, CSEC provides auto code grading feature, and beyond that it offers auto assessment for secure coding/security exploit assignments and team-based secure programming projects that follow "build it, break it, and fix it" concept. This unique feature makes CSEC a versatile tool that integrates security exploit evaluation into the auto code grading workflow.