NSF Award
1141314
The objective of this project is to develop a cybersecurity lab environment (EDURange) that is open to the public and allows creation of custom exercises in a 'live-fire' setting. It is designed to provide students with an active learning environment focusing on analysis skills rather than on training based on a pre-packaged set of tools. Preparing cybersecurity exercises is a major obstacle in many academic programs but the proposed environment is simple enough that faculty with limited knowledge of cybersecurity can employ it in the classroom. The exercises are accompanied by tutorials linked to learning objectives. EDURange's design, its lab scenarios and scoring system, reward the effort that students spend on analysis and reverse-engineering.<br/><br/>The proposed project focuses on: (1) the construction and deployment of cybersecurity scenarios in local and cloud environments; and (2) using the scenarios as an assessment tool for both students in the course of their studies as well as an independent benchmark for other cybersecurity training curricula.<br/><br/>EDURange scenarios are well-documented and of varying difficulty and complexity to make them attractive to a wide range of academic programs and institutions. The scenarios are hosted in a publicly available cybersecurity testbed and in a cloud environment. The project includes outreach activities at the annual SIGCSE conference.
