Engineering Assurance at the Undergraduate Level

What would it take for undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs to routinely produce graduates who can design computer systems that are assured to operate securely? To help answer that question, Syracuse University piloted the undergraduate Cyber Engineering Semester, which aimed to equip undergraduates with three key capabilities. The first was the ability to reason rigorously about security concepts of operations (ConOps). The second was the ability to employ security mechanisms as exemplified by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder's classic paper, "The Protection of Information in Computer Systems." The third was the ability to formally verify security ConOps and mechanisms using computer-assisted reasoning tools.