A Case Study of Adopting Security Guidelines in Undergraduate Software Engineering Education

Security plays a large role in software development; simply without its existence the software would be vulnerable to many different types of attacks. Software security prevents leaks of data, alternation of data, and unauthorized access to data. Building a secure software involves a number of different processes but security awareness and implementation are the most important ones among them. To produce high quality software security engineers need to meet today’s cybersecurity demands, security awareness and implementation must be integrated in undergraduate computer science programming courses. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of adopting security guidelines in undergraduate software engineering education. Thus, this paper focuses on integrating secure guidelines into existing applications to eliminate common security vulnerabilities. An assessment table, derived from several existing Java security guidelines, is developed to provide in depth critiques of the selected capstone project. Potential security vulnerabilities in the capstone project are identified and presented in a form showing the degree of threats against the three security characteristics: confidentiality, integrity, and availability addressed in the McCumber Cube model. Meanwhile, vulnerability density of the capstone project is calculated to demonstrate the performance of this research.