Tutorial 405: Creating Your Own Hands-on Cybersecurity Exercises
When it comes to hands-on cybersecurity exercises, few instructors write their own. There can be several reasons, including: the complexity of setting up a networked environment, designing the user interface, building in assessment/ scoring, hardening the system so that it is difficult to attack. For over 12 years, we have been developing and using a platform called EDURange, and recent work has made it easier to create, modify, and deploy exercises with assessment questions. EDURange has a dozen exercises, which span a wide range and can serve as templates for new ones.
In this tutorial, participants will get to try an exercise and discuss how they would modify it for their own class. We will choose one of the modifications and show how that can be implemented from the built-in version. EDURange also has new features, such as student-instructor chat for giving hints and machine learning algorithms for identifying which students need help.
Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest for CS educators. The goal of this tutorial is to empower faculty to add hands-on security exercises to more of their courses. We introduce EDURange, a framework for developing and assessing students with these exercises. We want to reach and engage all students.