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Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest. Do you have hands-on exercises that match the skills and levels of your students? Over the last few years, we have worked on making it easier to create, modify, and deploy exercises with assessment questions. EDURange is an open source project with exercises that span a wide range and can serve as templates for new ones. In addition to providing a framework for editing exercises, EDURange also allows Instructors to see student interaction and offer hints while they are doing the exercise. The features, that support this include chat with the instructor and machine learning algorithms for identifying which students need help. We plan to share some of the existing exercises and show how to adapt them to different students' profiles. We will also share our experiences with the hint system. Participants will gain experience in designing and adapting cybersecurity exercises and writing learning objectives and assessments. All backgrounds are welcome, whether you are new to teaching cybersecurity and have little experience with the command line, or whether you can create a network of containers and bash scripts to configure them. You will come away with a better understanding of how to design and create your own hands-on exercises.
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Hands-on Cybersecurity Exercises that are Easy to Access
The critical shortage of cyber security professionals has driven faculty interest in adding this to the curriculum, and it was added to the ACM/ IEEE Model Curriculum of 2013. This is a subject that demands hands-on exercises. There has been a modest increase in the number of such exercises, but the limit is usability. Most faculty do not have the time to create their own exercises, modify and install VMs, and set up assessment mechanisms. EDURange is a framework for accessing, developing and assessing interactive cybersecurity exercises. It has a range of exercises from introductory to advanced. We will demo an introductory exercise about using the command line and an advanced exercise about network scanning. We want to reach and engage as many faculty as possible, so that they can develop their own exercises. EDURange uses VMs in the cloud. Students only need an ssh-client. We have built tools to give faculty detailed information on how students are doing. This allows instructors to more easily see when students are stuck or heading in the wrong direction. The exercises we have created have manuals that instructors can use. Information about EDURange can be found at https://edurange.org.
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- PAR ID:
- 10112102
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1289 to 1289
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3293759
