Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the educational process of telecommunication engineering students by presenting the preparation of a team project focused on information security. Our educational approach combines basic knowledge such as mathematics with specialized engineering notions and various skills. The project theme is to design, implement and test an encryption algorithm. Students are provided with online courses, specific software programs and Internet access. They have to choose an encryption algorithm, to study its details and to write the script of the encryption algorithm in MATLAB program. The algorithm is implemented in C/C++ programming language and tested. Finally, a concurrent team tries to break the algorithm by finding the decryption key. It is an interactive approach which combines various education methods including gaming concepts. The covered topics provide students professional outcomes such as knowledge and use of specific mathematical tools and software environments (C/C ++ programming languages, MATLAB), abilities to design, develop, implement and test software algorithms. The project also provides transversal outcomes such as ability to team work, skills of computer use and information technology and capability to take responsibilities. Creativity is also encouraged by extending the algorithm to other encryption key lengths than the usual ones.
Highlights
The project is proposed to students, from "Telecommunication Systems and Technologies" bachelor program, during the "Introduction to Communication" class, in order to apply the theoretical notions presented in the course unit, focused on information security and encryption algorithms
FIPS PUB 197 standard is studied by the team and the steps of the algorithm are described synthetically: Each data block is written as a sequence of 16, 24, 32 or 64 bytes that become the elements of the data-matrix having four rows
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are designed by the students based on their knowledge of how to make a graphical user interface (GUI) in Matlab program or accessing the documentation
Summary
The project is proposed to students, from "Telecommunication Systems and Technologies" bachelor program, during the "Introduction to Communication" class, in order to apply the theoretical notions presented in the course unit, focused on information security and encryption algorithms The objective of this activity is to offer thorough knowledge of encryption techniques to the students and to develop their programming skills. Like in a gaming environment, a challenge is launched to the other teams, to find the secret decryption key In this way, the educational process has the main goal to develop different crossdisciplinary professional skills such as knowledge and use of specific mathematical tools and software environments (C/C ++ programming languages, MATLAB), abilities to design, develop, implement and test software algorithms and to develop student's transversal skills like team working, creativity and sense of responsibility. Educational methods and techniques are adapted to students, with different levels of motivation and attitudes about learning and working [1]
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