Teaching Cybersecurity Using the Cloud

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our experience when using cloud computing to teach a senior course on cybersecurity across two campuses via a virtual classroom equipped with live audio and video. Furthermore, based on this teaching experience, we propose guidelines that can be applied to teach similar computer science and engineering courses. We demonstrate how cloud-based laboratory exercises can greatly help students in acquiring crucial cybersecurity skills as well as cloud computing ones, which are in high demand nowadays. The cloud we used for this course was the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. However, our presented use cases and approaches are equally applicable to other available cloud platforms such as Rackspace and Google Compute Engine, among others

A system to secure websites and educate students about cyber security through crowdsourcing

Startups are innovative companies who have ideas for the betterment of the society. But, due to limited resources, and highly expensive testing procedures, they invest less time and money in securing their website and web applications. Furthermore, cyber security education lacks integrating practical knowledge with educational theoretical materials. Recognizing, the need to educate both startups and students about cyber security, this report presents Secure Startup - a novel system, that aims to provide startups with a platform to protect their website in a costeffective manner, while educating students about the real-world cyber skills. This system finds potential security problems in startup websites and provides them with effective solutions through a crowdtesting framework. Secure Startup, crowdsources the testers (security experts and students) of this system, through social media platforms, using Twitter Bots. The basic idea behind this report, is to understand, if such a system can help students learn the necessary cyber skills, while running successful tests and generating quality results for the startups. The results presented in this report show that, this system has a higher learning rate, and a higher task effectiveness rate, which helps in detecting and remediating maximum possible vulnerabilities. These results were generated after analyzing the performance of the testers and the learning capabilities of students, based on their feedback, trainings and task performance. These results have been promising in pursuing the system\u27s value which lays in enhancing the security of a startup website and providing a new approach for practical cyber security education