A Social Threat Modeling Framework to Structure Teaching about Responsible Computing

Abstract

Myriad projects and efforts are underway to infuse more content on ethical and socially-responsible computing into Computer Science curricula. Talks and papers on these projects largely focus on case studies and examples that can be included in assignments. This paper instead takes a pedagogic perspective. Drawing on papers on ethics-based design from multiple computing disciplines, as well as frameworks for identifying security threats, we designed a framework for identifying a variety of social threats in the kinds of programs that university students develop in their first two years of study. The framework is unique in centering around architectural components of applications, rather than stakeholders and values.