SEED: Hands-On Lab Exercises for Computer Security Education

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a set of hands-on exercises(labs) that covered a spectrum of security topics and could be shared with other instructors. The author developed SEED labs covering many security topics: vulnerabilities, attacks, software security, system security, network security, Web security, access control, authentication, cryptography, and so on. Most SEED labs have gone through multiple development trial cycles in university courses. Many universities have requested the instructor's manual and adopted SEED labs for their courses. Most SEED labs use Ubuntu Linux. A few labs require significant effort for kernel-level coding; for them, the author chose Minix, an instructional OS. SEED labs don't require a dedi cated physical laboratory. The author created a prebuilt VM image of Ubuntu and installed the necessary software. Various lab environment setups were tried, including using students' PCs, a general computing lab, and a cloud-computing infrastructure. And found that for convenience, students prefer to use their own computers.