Teaching Cryptography-based Software Developing with Open-source Software

Cryptography plays an important role in undergraduate curricula of the major of information security. The main topic in classroom can be taught as mathematics or cryptographic practice. Creating a course mixed with cryptography theory and software developing is emerging in information security curricula. In this paper, we present our experiences about this kind of emerging course. We open a practice course named Cryptography-based Software Developing for senior students in Guangzhou University. With the aid of the open-source project OpenSSL, the students are required to read cryptographic routines, extract specified source codes and integrate them into a self-designing cryptographic utility tool. The students are also required to work collaboratively and finish some software development documents. The course experience demonstrates positive effects and we think it can help students in studying cryptography and gaining engineering experience.