Can We use Authentic Learning to Educate Students About Secure Infrastructure as Code Development?

Akond Rahman, Shazibul Islam Shamim, Hossain Shahriar, Fan Wu in 27th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) 2022, 2022 Pre-print

Despite yielding benefits for organizations, infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts are susceptible to security weaknesses, such as hard-coded passwords. Existence of such security weaknesses necessitate integration of education materials related to secure development of IaC scripts. In this preliminary work, we describe our experiences of how application of authentic learning helped students learn about secure development of IaC scripts. Our paper shows education materials based on authentic learning to help students learn about secure IaC development.