EXPERIMENTING WITH CYBERSECURITY: ANOTHER WAY TO LEARN COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

Over the last few decades, computer security is gaining increasing importance in the fight against the loss of privacy, standing and money occasioned by computer attacks. One of the most common and intrusive attacks is known as buffer overflow. Just in the last three months, about three hundred vulnerabilities to this type of attack have been discovered. In order to come to understand the complex functioning of such attacks and can prevent them, a deep knowledge about machine language and computer architecture is required. This is the reason to relate this specific field of security with the lowest layer in the computer, its architecture. The increasing interest in cybersecurity leads us to change the traditional approach to teach computer architecture turning it into a close relationship between hardware and security to achieve a greater motivation among the students. We aim at promoting learning and research in low level languages since the first years in Computer Science degrees, taking advantage the courses related to Architecture of Computers but giving a practical approach focused in computer security. In this paper, we present a practical lesson based on experiential learning which helps the students of Architecture of Computers to internalize the concepts discussed in the subject through the design and deploy of the aforementioned cyber attack. It is intended to acquire a wider perspective of the usage and significance of studying assembly language and computer architecture and, at the same time, to awaken the desire to keep on learning and stepping up to new challenges. A set of surveys conducted on the students has demonstrated they have come to understand the studied contents will have a great utility in their professional future, significantly arousing their interest in the topics addressed in the subject.