Programming Education in the Era of the Internet: A Paradigm Shift

Over the last several years, the Computer Science (CS) community has put a great deal of effort in to the area of security research, and have made great advances. Counterintuitively, however, the number and severity of cyber threats is not declining, and further, the overall security of computer systems is not improving. Because of the magnitude of this problem, computer security is an issue that concerns everyone who works with computers. However, computer security training is only given in designated classes to a small set of computer systems users. This problem needs to be addressed at its core: in the educational system. Insecure code is written by people who do not know the implications of their coding techniques, and current texts and instruction do little to rectify this situation. Thus, the goal of this paper is to show the need to incorporate basic information assurance knowledge into general CS classes.