AI Security Literacy: Ecosystem-based Competency Framework and K-12 Learning Platform

Eric Yocam; Varghese Vaidyan; Paris Kalathas

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arXiv · 2610.28859

AI Security Literacy: Ecosystem-based Competency Framework and K-12 Learning Platform

Eric Yocam·Varghese Vaidyan·Paris Kalathas

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Abstract

Adoption of artificial intelligence in K-12 schools has outpaced guidance for students, teachers, and administrators. Existing AI-literacy frameworks emphasize understanding and use; cybersecurity frameworks predate AI-specific threats, and neither defines AI security literacy as a competency domain in its own right. We propose an AI Security Literacy (AISL) framework of six dimensions spanning the school ecosystem, ground its technical dimensions in public AI-safety benchmarks and a reproducible multi-seed adversarial evaluation, and ground its attitudinal dimensions in nationally representative survey micro-data from U.S. teachers and adults. Only 34.5% of teachers report a school AI policy, and teachers see their own AI use as easing their work but students' use as complicating it; on the technical side, a reported robustness figure depends as much on the attack and the particular trained model as on the system evaluated. NeuralFortify, a browser-based K-12 platform built on real AI models, is presented as an illustrative operationalization.

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Eric Yocam, Varghese Vaidyan, Paris Kalathas. 2026-10-20. AI Security Literacy: Ecosystem-based Competency Framework and K-12 Learning Platform. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28859

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