Teaching Authentication in High Schools: Challenges and Lessons Learned

As more of the activities of daily living take place online, computer security education for high school students is of increasing importance. To address this need, we designed, developed, and tested prototype curriculum materials to teach secondary school students about user authentication. We identify challenges encountered in this process, and contend that these challenges stem from the nature of security and are inherent to teaching it. We suggest that other safety-related topics (such as sex education) could provide valuable parallels for designing computer security curriculum.