By MARTY LEVINE
Too often, even the current engineering curriculum “largely ignores the threats and possible cyberattacks on engineering systems that are continuously evolving,” says Mai Abdelhakim, faculty member in the Swanson School of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department.
That’s why her current project — one of the seven recent faculty winners of 2023 Innovation in Education Awards from the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence — proposes to bring hands-on cybersecurity education to Pitt undergraduate engineering students.
Swanson faculty certainly teach students about current, crucial infrastructure systems, she notes. Students in her own department learn about the energy grid, while those in mechanical engineering delve into nuclear systems, and those in industrial engineering examine manufacturing systems. But we are living through a “radical transformation in these engineering systems,” Abdelhakim says, thanks to the way machines communicate with each other (through the “Internet of Things”) and other ways they exchange data automatically.
This makes our infrastructure smarter and more efficient but also more vulnerable to potential interference from outside. These “alarming cybersecurity concerns,” she says, “… can cause devastating damage to physical assets and public safety,” including “blackout in cities, damage in equipment, explosion of reactors, etc.”
Her project will create hands-on cybersecurity modules to use in current classes as well as a new, project-based cybersecurity class. The intention is to bring together a trio of subjects that are usually introduced separately, joining cybersecurity with engineering systems and data science/artificial intelligence. Students will learn security requirements for different systems and different types of cyberattacks as well as strategies for detecting and fending them off, including using AI defensively.
The classes will change as the technology and the threats change, such as Abdelhakim’s own current course on information security, a new cybersecurity course she will develop, and others, including courses in the new Swanson undergraduate certification in cybersecurity in emerging engineering systems whose development she is leading.
“The risks are also evolving,” she says, and AI is a double-edged sword: One can use it to make systems more efficient. “But you can also use it to craft smarter attacks. We need the courses updated to capture the new technologies and the new security risks.
“Students need to be prepared to meet these challenges,” she adds: “How can we cause AI to detect cyberattacks? How can students model different types of threats and how can they design different attacks? With these exercises they should be able to assess differences and limitations of defense mechanisms.”
Abdelhakim plans for her project to be completed by April of next year.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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