Engaging Part-Time Students in Software Security by Inductive Learning

Software problems are a considerable challenge in computer security. Implementation bugs and design flaws cause numerous security problems in software driven systems. An effective measure to optimize software security is to improve the education of software engineers. In this paper we present a combination of inductive learning approaches to engage part-time students in software security. We describe which types of examples we used to teach core practices of secure software development and which inductive learning styles fit best into that education concept. These examples combined with a virtual laboratory based on Linux and open source tools have been published on GitHub as an Open Educational Resource (OER).