Emerging Innovations and Global Challenges on Curriculum Design: Case Study of Teaching Security in Embedded System Design

Emerging innovations and global challenges are not only overwhelming human health and the environment but also complicating the training of the next generations of the workforce that will shape the future of the global economy. In particular, a topic of immediate concern is the security of embedded systems. Embedded systems are ubiquitous and are found in medical devices, nuclear plants, and chemical processing systems to name a few applications. The ever-increasing complexity of modern embedded systems has raised the potential for security breaches that may compromise the integrity and functions of these products. Although embedded systems design has been a core curriculum in most electrical and computer engineering programs, incorporating security-training skills at the undergraduate level remains challenging. Despite the enormity of security challenges, they are often ignored during the initial design and development period of an embedded system, thus leaving many devices vulnerable. We postulate that this design shortcoming is perhaps due, in part, to the teaching inadequacy of embedded security in early engineering education. In this paper we propose a framework to design an undergraduate curriculum that will incorporate security concepts in embedded systems courses. The curriculum will create new learning materials and teaching strategies that will focus on security concepts in early phases of embedded systems design. Because it is almost impossible to add security to an existing embedded system, the significance of this paper is to enforce life-learning awareness of security concerns in embedded systems design in early training of undergraduate students. The undergraduate curriculum will integrate security concerns, challenges, and concepts in all aspects of embedded systems design. We propose new learning materials and teaching strategies that will focus on securing the hardware and software programming of the central processing unit and its peripherals at the low-level layer allowing the upper-level layer to implement security standards with a greater efficiency. We will also provide advanced concepts that mitigate security breaches either by low-level encryption solutions or dead-end program destruction. The long-term goal of this paper is to promote security awareness in embedded systems at the undergraduate level.