Situated Learning Through the Use of Cooperative Techniques and Academic Controversy Applied to the Provision of Cryptographic Confidentiality

Cybersecurity teaching must be oriented to show the student the dichotomy that professional performance demands, to learn how to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity services and at the same time to develop the ability to find weaknesses in any system it evaluates. Because today´s students have different ways of learning, teaching these topics becomes a new challenge for teachers. This need has generated that the improvement of the teaching–learning processes becomes a continuous search in the engineering area. In this sense, this article shows a proposal of strategies where the students of the course of Critical Security Systems can clearly identify the context and the relation of what they learn with reality, reason why the situated learning helps to consolidate the knowledge, to perceive the utility and validity of what is learned. Using techniques of cooperative techniques and academic controversy, the efficiency is exercised in the design of symmetrical cryptographic systems of public key destined to provide the service of confidentiality of the information.