Enhancing Cybersecurity Skills by Creating Serious Games

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Authors

ŠVÁBENSKÝ Valdemar VYKOPAL Jan ČERMÁK Milan LAŠTOVIČKA Martin

Year of publication 2018
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'18)
MU Faculty or unit

Institute of Computer Science

Citation
Web Výsledek v sborníku konference
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3197091.3197123
Keywords cybersecurity; game-based learning; project-based learning
Attached files
Description Adversary thinking is an essential skill for cybersecurity experts, enabling them to understand cyber attacks and set up effective defenses. While this skill is commonly exercised by Capture the Flag games and hands-on activities, we complement these approaches with a key innovation: undergraduate students learn methods of network attack and defense by creating educational games in a cyber range. In this paper, we present the design of two courses, instruction and assessment techniques, as well as our observations over the last three semesters. The students report they had a unique opportunity to deeply understand the topic and practice their soft skills, as they presented their results at a faculty open day event. Their peers, who played the created games, rated the quality and educational value of the games overwhelmingly positively. Moreover, the open day raised awareness about cybersecurity and research and development in this field at our faculty. We believe that sharing our teaching experience will be valuable for instructors planning to introduce active learning of cybersecurity and adversary thinking.
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