Title: Create and Host Cyber Competition Using the Preliminary Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE)
As the world becomes more interconnected and our lives increasingly depend on the cyber world, the increasing threat of cyberattacks and cybercrimes make it critical for us to provide better and practical training of the cybersecurity workforce. In recent years, cybersecurity competition has become one of the most effective and attractive way for educating and training college students or professionals. In this paper, we first systematically introduce in details the step-by-step procedure and technical knowledge on how we take use of the ongoing DoD cyber-range environment called Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) to set up cyber competition virtualization environment, configure and install operating systems and popular services with various well-representative vulnerabilities, and set up the participant’s access and scoring system. Then we introduce the cybersecurity competition successfully organized by us in I/ITSEC 2019 conference, and the experience and lessons learned from this real-world competition event. The technical details and knowledge presented in this paper could help other researchers and educators to set up their own cyber competition environment or event to better train the future cybersecurity workforce. more »« less
Armstrong, Miriam E.; Jones, Keith S.; Namin, Akbar Siami; Newton, David C.
(, ACM Transactions on Computing Education)
null
(Ed.)
More specialized cybersecurity education programs are needed to address workforce needs, but it is unclear which knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) fulfil industry needs. We interviewed 48 professionals within four cyber defense specialty areas: (1) Cyber Network Defense Analysis, (2) Cyber Network Defense Infrastructure Support, (3) Incident Response, and (4) Vulnerability Assessment and Management. The professionals rated a number of specialized KSAs along two dimensions: how important the KSA was to their job and how difficult the KSA was to learn. Overall, communication and other non-technical skills were rated as being very important for all cyber defense jobs. Findings indicated that, for some specialty areas, technical knowledge and skills vary considerably between jobs and so the ability to teach oneself is more valuable than proficiency in any one KSA. Findings may be used to inform the development of general cybersecurity curricula, as well as curricula that focus on Cyber Network Defense Analysis, Cyber Network Defense Infrastructure Support, or Vulnerability Assessment and Management.
Piplai, Aritran; Anoruo, Mike; Fasaye, Kayode; Joshi, Anupam; Finin, Tim; Ridley, Ahmad
(, 21st IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications)
Cyber defense exercises are an important avenue to understand the technical capacity of organizations when faced with cyber-threats. Information derived from these exercises often leads to finding unseen methods to exploit vulnerabilities in an organization. These often lead to better defense mechanisms that can counter previously unknown exploits. With recent developments in cyber battle simulation platforms, we can generate a defense exercise environment and train reinforcement learning (RL) based autonomous agents to attack the system described by the simulated environment. In this paper, we describe a two-player game-based RL environment that simultaneously improves the performance of both the attacker and defender agents. We further accelerate the convergence of the RL agents by guiding them with expert knowledge from Cybersecurity Knowledge Graphs on attack and mitigation steps. We have implemented and integrated our proposed approaches into the CyberBattleSim system.
Jacob, Johanna; Wei, Wei; Sha, Kewei; Davari, Sadegh; Yang, T. Andrew
(, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Scientific Computing (CSC'18). Las Vegas, USA.)
Cybersecurity is a rapidly developing field in which job titles and role descriptions may vary from one organization to the others. The NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (NCWF) provides a common language to categorize and describe cybersecurity work for organizations to build a strong workforce. As the predominant workforce prescribed by the NCWF is technical in nature, academic efforts targeted towards these career paths are likewise technical. Though technical security education is critical, an equal amount of knowledge outside the technical domain is pivotal to understand sophisticated challenges in cybersecurity. Articulating a concise, inclusive, meaningful, and unifying approach in cyber related education fosters a balanced motivation for students from both technical and non-technical majors (interdisciplinary) to pursue a career in cybersecurity. Towards this end, we analyzed competencies, knowledge, skills and abilities of interdisciplinary roles and other roles introduced in the NCWF; we then highlighted discrepancies observed.
Kuttolamadom, M; Wang, J; Griffith, D; Greer, C
(, ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)
The objective of this paper is to outline the details of a recently-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project that aims to educate and enable the current and future manufacturing workforce to operate in an Industry 4.0 environment. Additionally, the startup procedures involved, the major ongoing activities during year-one, and preliminary impressions and lessons learned will be elaborated as well. Industry 4.0 refers to the ongoing reformation of advanced manufacturing (Operation Technologies - OT) enabled by advances in automation/data (Information Technologies - IT). Cyber-enabled smart manufacturing is a multidisciplinary approach that integrates the manufacturing process, its monitoring/control, data science, cyber-physical systems, and cloud computing to drive manufacturing operations. This is further propelled by the dissolution of boundaries separating IT and OT, presenting optimization opportunities not just at a machine-level, but at the plant/enterprise-levels. This so-called fourth industrial revolution is rapidly percolating the discrete and continuous manufacturing industry. It is therefore critical for the current and future US workforce to be cognizant and capable of such interdisciplinary domain knowledge and skills. To meet this workforce need, this project will develop curricula, personnel and communities in cyber-enabled smart manufacturing. The key project components will include: (i) Curriculum Road-Mapping and Implementation – one that integrates IT and OT to broaden the educational experience and employability via road-mapping workshops, and then to develop/implement curricula, (ii) Interdisciplinary Learning Experiences – through collaborative special-projects courses, industry internships and research experiences, (iii) Pathways to Industry 4.0 Careers – to streamline career pathways to enter Industry 4.0 careers, and to pursue further education, and (iv) Faculty Development – continuous improvement via professional development workshops and faculty development leaves. It is expected that this project will help define and chart-out the capabilities demanded from the next-generation workforce to fulfill the call of Industry 4.0, and the curricular ingredients necessary to train and empower them. This will help create an empowered workforce well-suited for Industry 4.0 careers in cyber-enabled smart manufacturing. The collaborative research team’s experience so far in starting up and establishing the project has further shed light on some of the essentials and practicalities needed for achieving the grand vision of enabling the manufacturing workforce for the future. Altogether, the experience and lessons learned during the year-one implementation has provided a better perception of what is needed for imparting a broader impact through this project.
Kuttolamadom, M; Wang, J; Griffith, D; Greer, C.
(, ASEE annual conference exposition)
The objective of this paper is to outline the details of a recently-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project that aims to educate and enable the current and future manufacturing workforce to operate in an Industry 4.0 environment. Additionally, the startup procedures involved, the major ongoing activities during year-one, and preliminary impressions and lessons learned will be elaborated as well. Industry 4.0 refers to the ongoing reformation of advanced manufacturing (Operation Technologies - OT) enabled by advances in automation/data (Information Technologies - IT). Cyber-enabled smart manufacturing is a multidisciplinary approach that integrates the manufacturing process, its monitoring/control, data science, cyber-physical systems, and cloud computing to drive manufacturing operations. This is further propelled by the dissolution of boundaries separating IT and OT, presenting optimization opportunities not just at a machine-level, but at the plant/enterprise-levels. This so-called fourth industrial revolution is rapidly percolating the discrete and continuous manufacturing industry. It is therefore critical for the current and future US workforce to be cognizant and capable of such interdisciplinary domain knowledge and skills. To meet this workforce need, this project will develop curricula, personnel and communities in cyber-enabled smart manufacturing. The key project components will include: (i) Curriculum Road-Mapping and Implementation – one that integrates IT and OT to broaden the educational experience and employability via road-mapping workshops, and then to develop/implement curricula, (ii) Interdisciplinary Learning Experiences – through collaborative special-projects courses, industry internships and research experiences, (iii) Pathways to Industry 4.0 Careers – to streamline career pathways to enter Industry 4.0 careers, and to pursue further education, and (iv) Faculty Development – continuous improvement via professional development workshops and faculty development leaves. It is expected that this project will help define and chart-out the capabilities demanded from the next-generation workforce to fulfill the call of Industry 4.0, and the curricular ingredients necessary to train and empower them. This will help create an empowered workforce well-suited for Industry 4.0 careers in cyber-enabled smart manufacturing. The collaborative research team’s experience so far in starting up and establishing the project has further shed light on some of the essentials and practicalities needed for achieving the grand vision of enabling the manufacturing workforce for the future. Altogether, the experience and lessons learned during the year-one implementation has provided a better perception of what is needed for imparting a broader impact through this project.
Thompson, Christopher, Bearden, Gabriel A., Sloan, Ty, Laurens, Roy, Zou, Cliff, and Caulkins, Bruce. Create and Host Cyber Competition Using the Preliminary Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10291781. Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) .
Thompson, Christopher, Bearden, Gabriel A., Sloan, Ty, Laurens, Roy, Zou, Cliff, & Caulkins, Bruce. Create and Host Cyber Competition Using the Preliminary Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE). Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10291781.
Thompson, Christopher, Bearden, Gabriel A., Sloan, Ty, Laurens, Roy, Zou, Cliff, and Caulkins, Bruce.
"Create and Host Cyber Competition Using the Preliminary Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE)". Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10291781.
@article{osti_10291781,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Create and Host Cyber Competition Using the Preliminary Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE)},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10291781},
abstractNote = {As the world becomes more interconnected and our lives increasingly depend on the cyber world, the increasing threat of cyberattacks and cybercrimes make it critical for us to provide better and practical training of the cybersecurity workforce. In recent years, cybersecurity competition has become one of the most effective and attractive way for educating and training college students or professionals. In this paper, we first systematically introduce in details the step-by-step procedure and technical knowledge on how we take use of the ongoing DoD cyber-range environment called Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) to set up cyber competition virtualization environment, configure and install operating systems and popular services with various well-representative vulnerabilities, and set up the participant’s access and scoring system. Then we introduce the cybersecurity competition successfully organized by us in I/ITSEC 2019 conference, and the experience and lessons learned from this real-world competition event. The technical details and knowledge presented in this paper could help other researchers and educators to set up their own cyber competition environment or event to better train the future cybersecurity workforce.},
journal = {Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC)},
author = {Thompson, Christopher and Bearden, Gabriel A. and Sloan, Ty and Laurens, Roy and Zou, Cliff and Caulkins, Bruce},
editor = {null}
}
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