Applying Rating Systems to Challenge Based Cybersecurity Education

Abstract

As technology becomes a larger part of everyday life, it becomes increasingly more important for CS and CIT students to learn about cyber security during their education. While many cyber security oriented courses exist, it is also necessary that students must be able to work and learn in an environment that resembles a real world context. To address this problem it has become common to adapt cyber security challenges into the classroom as a method for students to put their knowledge into practice. One problem is that these challenges can vary considerably in levels of difficulty, which makes it problematic for students to be able to select a challenge that is an appropriate difficulty for their skill level. A potential solution to this problem could be to adapt a rating system to rank both the students and the challenges. This would then allow the students to easily select challenges that are appropriate for them to engage with by comparing their own rating with the rating of available challenges. In this project we propose methods that could be used to adapt a rating system to an existing cyber security education program. Finally we propose a method to survey students that interact with the program so that the effect of the rating system can be measured.