Hands-on Cybersecurity Exercises That are Easy to Access and Assess (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest for CS educators. The goal of this workshop is to empower faculty to add hands-on security exercises to their courses. We introduce EDURange, a framework for accessing, developing and assessing interactive cybersecurity exercises. We want to reach and engage all students. The first step is to have interesting challenges that are easy to access. EDURange uses VMs in a public cloud, which also provides flexible resources. No software needs to be installed - students only need an ssh client. Another step is to give students feedback on how they are doing. This is an important role for faculty and is not something to automate. Instead, EDURange provides basic tools to visualize what students are doing as they work on the exercises. This allows instructors to more easily see when students are stuck or heading in the wrong direction. Since cybersecurity exercises are often easy to understand but hard to solve, guidance is especially important so that students don't become frustrated. In this workshop, participants will get to try EDURange and several exercises, including an introduction to ssh. Participants don't need to be security experts. We will provide sample syllabuses for an introductory security course as well as an interdisciplinary security course, and we will show how our exercises can be integrated into these courses. More information at http://www.edurange.org. Laptop required.