An ontology guiding assessment framework for hacking competition

Abstract

Hacking competitions serve an important role in cybersecurity education, especially in increasing students' learning motivations and practical experiences. A proper feedback can promote students reflective thinking and improve learning performances. It's essential to collect logs for effective portfolio assessment. However, a conventional hacking competition setup is a heterogeneous environment, including different applications, operating systems and virtual machines. It's important to unify these heterogeneous logs to form high quality portfolios. In this paper, we first propose hacking competition ontology to represent concepts within competitions and their relationships. The describing ability of ontology can link heterogeneous logs to participants' intentions. Based on the proposed ontology, we develop an automatic hacking competition assessment framework including log collection, aggregation and analysis. Experimental results show that our proposed assessment framework can reveal participants' misconceptions within competition.