Secure Data Management in the Classroom

In recent years, information security and assurance has received considerable attention from the computing community, with universities revamping course offerings in areas such as cryptography, network security, enterprise systems security, secure coding, and digital forensics. Although secure data management is a major aspect of overall information systems security, it has received less attention than it deserves. This has not been the case at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) where a course in secure database systems has been offered since 2003. The course has undergone revisions over the years and it was recently converted to be an online course. The authors have worked in the area of information security from different perspectives. The first author, who has over a decade of practical experience in security in computer systems and holds several industry security certifications, recently took the secure database systems course at RIT as a student. The second author, who is the faculty member at RIT who developed and teaches the secure database systems course, previously worked as a software developer and manager in the financial services industry working with secure data in globally distributed systems. Based on their complementary experiences and using RIT’s existing secure data management course, this work-inprogress paper describes how research and practice have been blended to create an effective course in secure data management.