Case Study 2: Mapping between an E-Voting Curriculum and the DHS/NSA CAE Knowledge Units

To become a DHS/NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD), academic institutions must satisfy several specific Knowledge Units (KUs). How they achieve this is up to the institutions. In this case study, we follow the methodology of an earlier work to demonstrate how key parts of an electronic voting (E-voting)-oriented cybersecurity curriculum, proposed by Hostler et al. [4] in 2021, maps into the DHS/NSA KUs supporting the CAE-CD designation, from two aspects: E-voting principle based topics, i.e., from theory and a plug-and-play e-voting system's composing components, i.e., from practice. We grouped CAE-CD KUs into those required as prerequisites, closely related, related/supported, and not covered by the E-voting curriculum. Teachers can then choose which KUs they will use and teach using only the parts of the E-voting-oriented curriculum they deem relevant, and in a depth they find appropriate to their educational objectives, while meeting the requirements of the selected KUs. We conclude with a discussion of how LLMs (Large Language Models) and quantum computing might be added to the E-voting-oriented curriculum.