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Building a skilled cybersecurity workforce is paramount to building a safer digital world. However, the diverse skill set, constantly emerging vulnerabilities, and deployment of new cyber threats make learning cybersecurity challenging. Traditional education methods struggle to cope with cybersecurity's rapidly evolving landscape and keep students engaged and motivated. Different studies on students' behaviors show that an interactive mode of education by engaging through a question-answering system or dialoguing is one of the most effective learning methodologies. There is a strong need to create advanced AI-enabled education tools to promote interactive learning in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available standard question-answer datasets to build such systems for students and novice learners to learn cybersecurity concepts, tools, and techniques. The education course material and online question banks are unstructured and need to be validated and updated by domain experts, which is tedious when done manually. In this paper, we propose CyberGen, a novel unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KG) to generate the questions and answers for cybersecurity automatically. Augmenting the structured knowledge from knowledge graphs in prompts improves factual reasoning and reduces hallucinations in LLMs. We used the knowledge triples from cybersecurity knowledge graphs (AISecKG) to design prompts for ChatGPT and generate questions and answers using different prompting techniques. Our question-answer dataset, CyberQ, contains around 4k pairs of questions and answers. The domain expert manually evaluated the random samples for consistency and correctness. We train the generative model using the CyberQ dataset for question answering task.

 

Knowledge graphs are graph-based data models which can represent real-time data that is constantly growing with the addition of new information. The question-answering systems over knowledge graphs (KGQA) retrieve answers to a natural language question from the knowledge graph. Most existing KGQA systems use static knowledge bases for offline training. After deployment, they fail to learn from unseen new entities added to the graph. There is a need for dynamic algorithms which can adapt to the evolving graphs and give interpretable results. In this research work, we propose using new auction algorithms for question answering over knowledge graphs. These algorithms can adapt to changing environments in real-time, making them suitable for offline and online training. An auction algorithm computes paths connecting an origin node to one or more destination nodes in a directed graph and uses node prices to guide the search for the path. The prices are initially assigned arbitrarily and updated dynamically based on defined rules. The algorithm navigates the graph from the high-price to the low-price nodes. When new nodes and edges are dynamically added or removed in an evolving knowledge graph, the algorithm can adapt by reusing the prices of existing nodes and assigning arbitrary prices to the new nodes. For subsequent related searches, the “learned” prices provide the means to “transfer knowledge” and act as a “guide”: to steer it toward the lower-priced nodes. Our approach reduces the search computational effort by 60% in our experiments, thus making the algorithm computationally efficient. The resulting path given by the algorithm can be mapped to the attributes of entities and relations in knowledge graphs to provide an explainable answer to the query. We discuss some applications for which our method can be used.

 

Cybersecurity education is exceptionally challenging as it involves learning the complex attacks; tools and developing critical problem-solving skills to defend the systems. For a student or novice researcher in the cybersecurity domain, there is a need to design an adaptive learning strategy that can break complex tasks and concepts into simple representations. An AI-enabled automated cybersecurity education system can improve cognitive engagement and active learning. Knowledge graphs (KG) provide a visual representation in a graph that can reason and interpret from the underlying data, making them suitable for use in education and interactive learning. However, there are no publicly available datasets for the cybersecurity education domain to build such systems. The data is present as unstructured educational course material, Wiki pages, capture the flag (CTF) writeups, etc. Creating knowledge graphs from unstructured text is challenging without an ontology or annotated dataset. However, data annotation for cybersecurity needs domain experts. To address these gaps, we made three contributions in this paper. First, we propose an ontology for the cybersecurity education domain for students and novice learners. Second, we develop AISecKG, a triple dataset with cybersecurity-related entities and relations as defined by the ontology. This dataset can be used to construct knowledge graphs to teach cybersecurity and promote cognitive learning. It can also be used to build downstream applications like recommendation systems or self-learning question-answering systems for students. The dataset would also help identify malicious named entities and their probable impact. Third, using this dataset, we show a downstream application to extract custom-named entities from texts and educational material on cybersecurity. 

In college cybersecurity education, problem-based learning has been introduced to promote student agency in solving a complex problem. However, a dilemma of balancing the student agency persist and previous research has focused on students’ cognitive, metacognitive, and regulatory to enhance the efficacy of PBL. Given the importance of students’ self-awareness of their agency, this study suggests a concept of meta-agency as an essential learner characteristic that influences the effectiveness of student agency in PBL. Four dimensions of meta-agency, perceptions of productive struggle, expectation alignment between instructor and students, strategies for regulating agency, and familiarity with PBL tasks, were qualitatively explored with student interview data. Features of meta-agency and how students’ meta-agency level develop through cybersecurity PBL sessions were further investigated. 

In problem-based learning (PBL), individual differences in students’ use of metacognition and self-regulation skills exist and calls for extensive research in postsecondary STEM education. This study focuses on students’ uncertainty management in PBL. A scale of the uncertainty management in PBL (UM-PBL) was developed. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted and showed that the UM-PBL has substantial reliability and a total of 14 items across three constructs of a) perception of uncertainty in learning to solve problems, b) self-efficacy in and c) strategy for uncertainty management. Gender differences in the first two constructs were found, confirming its known-group validation. Students’ problem-solving scores were positively correlated with scores of the first two constructs, suggesting its predictability of its relationship with academic performance. 

Knowledge graphs gained popularity in recent years and have been useful for concept visualization and contextual information retrieval in various applications. However, constructing a knowledge graph by scraping long and complex unstructured texts for a new domain in the absence of a well-defined ontology or an existing labeled entity-relation dataset is difficult. Domains such as cybersecurity education can harness knowledge graphs to create a student-focused interactive and learning environment to teach cybersecurity. Learning cybersecurity involves gaining the knowledge of different attack and defense techniques, system setup and solving multi-facet complex real-world challenges that demand adaptive learning strategies and cognitive engagement. However, there are no standard datasets for the cybersecurity education domain. In this research work, we present a bottom-up approach to curate entity-relation pairs and construct knowledge graphs and question-answering models for cybersecurity education. To evaluate the impact of our new learning paradigm, we conducted surveys and interviews with students after each project to find the usefulness of bot and the knowledge graphs. Our results show that students found these tools informative for learning the core concepts and they used knowledge graphs as a visual reference to cross check the progress that helped them complete the project tasks.