Teaching Secure Program Design

Developing secure software applications is becoming very critical because many different types of attacks are caused by software vulnerabilities. In order to effectively teach secure software engineering, we have developed a course module titled “Introduction to Secure Program Design”. This paper presents the content of this module and reports our teaching experiences. This module was successfully taught in the COMP 280 Data Structures class during the Fall 2018 semester in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina A&T State University. Our experience exhibited that teaching this module helped students not only gain knowledge and understanding about the impacts of input flaws and buffer overflows, but also they gained significant knowledge about the practice of designing secure programs. Students’ surveyed responses and feedback reflected that this module was very valuable towards their educational experience. This content could be taught in second year sophomore classes of software engineering, computer science and information technology.