Seth Hamman, Ph.D.
Director, Center for the Advancement of Cybersecurity and Associate Professor of Cyber Operations and Computer Science | Cedarville University
Cedarville, OH, UNITED STATES
Dr. Hamman is interested in helping to shape the young and growing discipline of cybersecurity education.
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Biography
Dr. Hamman joined the faculty at Cedarville in 2012. He brings real-world experience to the classroom from having worked in the tech industry, both as an employee of a startup dotcom and as a consultant. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis in cybersecurity at the Air Force's graduate school, the Air Force Institute of Technology, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a researcher he is interested in helping to shape the young and growing discipline of cybersecurity education.
Industry Expertise (3)
Education/Learning
Computer/Network Security
Religious Institutions
Areas of Expertise (1)
Cybersecurity Issues and Stories
Education (3)
The Air Force Institute of Technology: Ph.D., Computer Science 2016
Dissertation: Improving the Cybersecurity of Cyber-Physical Systems Through Behavioral Game Theory and Model Checking in Practice and in Education
Yale University: M.S., Computer Science 2011
Duke University: B.A., Religion 2002
Links (1)
Media Appearances (4)
Cybersecurity Stamp of Approval
WDTN TV tv
2018-06-08
Seth Hamman joins WDTN TV to discuss cybersecurity.
Dayton business people in the news
Dayton Daily News online
2016-10-17
Seth Hamman, professor of computer science at Cedarville University, received his doctorate in computer science from the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), on Sept. 15. His dissertation focused heavily on cybersecurity.
Cedarville to Launch Cybersecurity Track in Fall 2016
Cedars online
2016-05-05
Cedarville University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science is launching a cybersecurity track within the computer science major for the 2016-2017 school year. In a post-Edward Snowden, Apple v. FBI age, cybersecurity is in the news nearly every day, and Cedarville’s program will allow its students to be competitive in the computer science field.
People are (still) the biggest security risks
CIO online
2016-03-25
"We're battling thousands of years of evolution," says Kevin Epstein, vice president of the Threat Operations Center at Proofpoint. "It's natural to be curious about things. Unfortunately, with email scams, it's better to think before you click."
Research Grants (1)
2017 NSA Curriculum Development Grant
NSA $100.000
2017-04-14
Following published results of the effectiveness of teaching game theory to improve the adversarial thinking abilities of cybersecurity students, the work for this grant will go into developing the curriculum materials such that they could be used by other cybersecurity educators.
Articles (2)
Teaching Game Theory to Improve Adversarial Thinking in Cybersecurity Students
IEEE Transactions on Education2017 The ability to anticipate the strategic actions of hackers, including where, when, and how they might attack, and their tactics for evading detection, is a valuable skill for cybersecurity. Therefore, developing the strategic reasoning abilities of cybersecurity students is an important cybersecurity education learning objective. This paper proposes that basic game theory concepts should be taught to cybersecurity students in order to improve their strategic reasoning abilities. It details a pretest-posttest educational experiment that demonstrates that 2 h of basic game theory instruction results in a statistically significant improvement in students' abilities to anticipate the strategic actions of others. It also provides details of the game theory curriculum to help other cybersecurity educators replicate these results. Additionally, this paper suggests that another benefit of teaching game theory in a cybersecurity course is that it may fundamentally alter the way students view the practice of cybersecurity, helping to sensitize them to the human adversary element inherent in cybersecurity in addition to technology-focused best practices. This could result in a more naturally strategic-minded, and therefore better equipped, cybersecurity workforce.
A Model Checking Approach to Testing the Reliability of Smart Grid Protection Systems
IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery2017 As distributed, communication-based protection systems become more prevalent in the emerging smart grid, the task of critically assessing their reliability has become increasingly challenging due to the complexity of their underlying software designs. This paper demonstrates that the discipline of software model checking can be applied to smart grid protection software designs to rigorously assess their fault tolerance. In this paper, the SPIN model checker (SPIN) is applied to a published wide-area backup protection system (WABPS). The WABPS was specifically architected to be highly reliable under various kinds of common failure scenarios, including mechanical malfunctions, erroneous sensor readings, and communication failures. However, because of its built-in redundancy and decentralized peer-to-peer design, calculating its precise fault tolerance is nontrivial. This paper shows how SPIN can be applied to the WABPS’s design to brute-force prove the limits of the number and types of failures that can occur while the system remains able to successfully perform its function. This same technique is applicable to a wide variety of smart grid protection software designs, and the information it provides is invaluable to protection engineers during the development of new systems, for assessing the quality of competing designs, and for risk management purposes.
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