This proposal offers to teams Mississippi State University?s (MSU) Southeast Region Regional Forensics Training Center and its Center for Critical Infrastructure Protection with collaborators at Auburn University and Tuskegee University to provide tactical level occupational training to America?s veterans by collaborating with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and offering no-cost training at or near VA hospitals. The proposal requests funding to support the enhancement of an existing digital forensics curriculum and then eventually installing it within the Veterans Administration system nation-wide. The proposal addresses a recognized and documented workforce need for skilled cyber infrastructure employees and offers to address this need by training a diverse community. The proposal builds on the combined capabilities of MSU, Auburn, and Tuskegee. MSU and Auburn are both National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE/IAE) and Tuskegee is currently pursuing that certification. The proposal integrates research into its training offering and strongly leverages an existing successful training initiative.
Mississippi State University pioneered making digital forensics accessible to broad, non-technical audiences. Auburn’s NSF-sponsored digital forensics partnership with Mississippi State and Tuskegee University has resulted in a major contribution to servicemen being medically retired from their combat injuries. Auburn University’s effort has resulted in providing digital forensics retraining to more than 600 wounded servicemen and women. Our digital forensic training program was initially based on the highly successful digital forensics training program developed at Mississippi State. At the completion of the training, service members had a basic understanding of how to process digital evidence, familiarity with concepts such as lawful search and seizure and chain of custody, as well as hands on experience with the tools and procedures used to process this evidence. Warrior Transition Battalions (WTBs) are units where wounded soldiers are assigned while they undergo medical treatment and await a determination whether they will be medically retired or returned to duty. Assignment to a WTB is stressful. Soldiers not only have to deal with a broad array of injuries, many if not most, also have to deal with an involuntary career change. Providing soldiers a hands-on learning experience while they are awaiting the results of Medical Evaluation Boards is not only good for morale, it is also great professional development and provides very real assistance in their transition to civilian life. Soldiers that are able to return to duty will do so with increased awareness and skill in information assurance, a skill that will serve the DoD as a whole very well. While our focus has been on Army veterans, servicemen in all services face the same issues and we have established relationships with Air Force organizations. Auburn’s implementation of an advanced forensics course continues the training begun by the basic course, but presents a much deeper analysis and a more "whole solution" treatment of forensic investigation, whereas the basic course is more task-oriented training. After each of the basic courses that we have taught, students have expressed great interest in having us return to teach the advanced material as well. We have taught our Advanced Digital Forensics at Camp Murray, WA, an Army National Guard Base and at Fort Riley, KS, Fort Benning, GA and Eglin AFB. One challenge in working with wounded personnel is that their assignment to transition units is fleeting. Our digital forensics basic course proved to be so popular at Redstone Arsenal that we designed a follow-on course. Unfortunately, many soldiers depart the WTBs/WTUs before we can return to conduct an advanced course. Our experience was that any soldiers still assigned to the WTB/WTUs when we returned to conduct the advanced course all signed up to take the advanced course. The survey results were consistently positive from more than 90% of the participants. Despite our best efforts, some participants signed up for the forensics program without really understanding what it was about. Participants who hate using computers did not change that viewpoint as a result of our program. Additionally, the instructors continue to be available for the students to contact even after the class is completed to answer any questions that the students may not have considered during class or experiences that occurred later on. Post course follow up is one aspect of this effort we are currently working to automate and improve by extending our use of virtual machines. Auburn University has successfully adapted our digital forensics outreach to high school students through the successful staging of the "Digital CSI" Summer Camp. This camp was held in July 2010, June 2011, and June 2012 and July 2013 with more than 80 high school students participating in total and is now self-sustaining. The summer camp features the same basic curriculum as the course taught to wounded soldiers with a few minor changes. Our 2013 summer camp was even more successful than our first three summer camps. We lacked the capacity to accommodate all of the students who wanted to participate. Many of our campers were young women, and the course was predominantly taught to minority students this past year. Comments were uniformly positive, and the real positive experiences came from helping a few students who have found a new passion. Thanks to generous NSF CI Teams support we have had a positive impact on more than 600 wounded servicemen and women and more than 80 high school students.
