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The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to Professor Giovanni Vigna for support of a project titled, "Educating the Security Workforce through On-Demand Live Competitions." 

Project Summary
The United States is facing a cyber-security crisis. The 2015 (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce Study predicts a shortfall of 1.5 million global information security jobs by 2020.
 The lack of qualified cyber-security workforce gives rise to high-profile security incidents,
 such as the recent Office of Personal Management data breach. Therefore, it is crucial to educate the next generation of cyber-security professionals.

Cyber-security exercises, in which students analyze software to discover flaws, are an excellent instructional method to effectively improve the security skills of protection, detection, and response. 
This proposal is built on the lessons learned by running the world’s largest educational cyber-security competition for 12 years.

The Principal Investigators (PIs) propose to allow any educator, regardless of technical ability, to host
t heir own security competition. In addition, they can develop their own intentionally-vulnerable software, which stimulates creativity and constructive behavior. Finally, the PIs will develop 
a repository of intentionally-vulnerable software, which allows educators to select from different vulnerability classes.