Cybersecurity Curriculum Design: A Survey

Abstract

The threat of cyber attacks continue to grow with the increasing number of sophisticated and successful targeted cyber attacks throughout the globe. To address this issue, there is a dire need for cybersecurity professionals with adequate motivation and skills to prevent, detect, respond, or even mitigate the effect of such threats. To this end, several cybersecurity educational programs and concentrations have been established over the past years both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Moreover, a number of initiatives taken by the government standard bodies in the cybersecurity domain have emerged to help in framing cybersecurity education. Due to the interdisciplinary (and sometimes multidisciplinary) nature of cybersecurity, educational institutions face many issues when designing a cybersecurity curriculum. In this context, we believe that there is a desideratum to provide a big picture of the overall efforts done so far in the direction of cybersecurity curriculum design. In this paper, we present an overview and comparison of existing curriculum design approaches for cybersecurity education. This survey will help the researchers and educators to have an overview of the existing approaches for the purpose of developing a suitable and more effective cybersecurity curriculum in their future endeavour.