2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Cyber security is a broad field that covers the development of mechanisms to prevent, detect, and recover from cyber and physical attacks. These security mechanisms should enfold the security of the assets in the company, the security of the information (PII, know-how, and software), and the security of the network components and devices. When the systems have vulnerabilities in the software or hardware, they become an easy target for attacks. The motivation to perform these attacks can be to steal information, have unauthorized access to data and networks, make a system unavailable, or damage a company’s reputation. Therefore, knowing how to minimize the vulnerabilities in the systems is crucial to reduce the possibility of being attacked.

Currently, few undergraduate engineering programs offer a minor in cyber security that gives the minimum knowledge an engineer should have in order to create secure engineering solutions and only, some universities offer a Cyber Security Engineering program. In this program, students learn to identify threats and vulnerabilities in hardware systems and software and apply these concepts in developing engineering solutions that are prepared against physical and cyber-attacks.

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) is an emerging idea of integrating cyber security considerations into engineering projects, especially those that involve the development of physical objects and machinery such as cyber-physical systems. Without cyber security knowledge, the solutions created by engineers can be an open door for hackers to manipulate the systems/machinery/objects for their own benefit. This creates a need to design and integrate CIE content that is relevant for any engineering undergraduate program.

This paper presents a preliminary curriculum design that can be used as a base for the design of an undergraduate engineering course customized for different engineering programs. The content proposed can also be used to define a sequence of courses to create a minor in Cyber-Informed Engineering applicable to different engineering fields. As previously mentioned, the focus will be the undergraduate engineering fields that deal with software or physical machinery, such as software, computer, electrical, mechanical, aerospace, and industrial engineering, among others.