Teaching Security in the Era of Generative AI: A Course Design of Security + ChatGPT

The 2023 CS curriculum by ACM, IEEE, and AAAI identifies security as an independent knowledge area that develops the “security mindset” so that students are ready for the “continual changes” in computing. Likewise, the curriculum emphasises the coverage of “uses”, and “shortcomings/pitfalls” of practical AI-tools like ChatGPT. This paper presents our endeavors to approach those goals with the design of an Information Security course. Our course design bears the following distinct features: Certificate-readiness, where we align the knowledge areas with major security/ethical hacking certificates; Coverage of ChatGPT, where the uses of ChatGPT for assisting security tasks and security issues caused by ChatGPT usage are both addressed for the first time in the teaching; “Learn defending from attackers' perspective”, where labs of both offensive and defensive natures are developed to equally sharpen ethical hacking and hardening skills, and to facilitate the discussion on legal/ethical implications; Current and Representative, where ajust-enough set of representative and/or current security topics are selected in order and covered in respective modules in the most current form. In addition, we generalize our design principles and strategies, with the hope to shed lights on similar efforts in other institutions.