Defining a Curriculum Framework in Information Assurance and Security

this paper, we describe a community effort to identify the common body of knowledge (CBK) for computer security curricula. Academicians and practitioners have been engaged in targeted workshops for the past two years, producing the results given here. The long-term objective for the project is to develop a curriculum framework for undergraduate and graduate programs in Information Assurance (IA). The framework includes: identification of broad areas of knowledge considered important for practicing professionals in information assurance, identification of key learning objectives for each of these areas, identification of a body of core knowledge and skills that all programs should contain, and a model curriculum including scope and sequence. The framework's development has been facilitated by workshops and working groups of leading information assurance educators. The goal is to produce document similar to the Joint IEEE Computer Society/ACM Task Force document (1) "Model Curricula for Computing" (Computer Science Volume) which will then be widely distributed for comment and dissemination. We anticipate that the framework will be used to guide the development of shared instructional materials, classroom instruction, and the assessment of individuals and programs. The focus for this paper is the design of the curriculum framework and the identification of the common body of knowledge. One of the interesting challenges is the breadth of the Information Assurance field. There is a tendency to view IA as strictly a subset of computer science, however many of the issues that professionals address require knowledge and skills drawn from traditionally non-computer disciplines. IA is truly a multidisciplinary endeavor, blending topics that span the disciplines of computer scienc..