A Capture The Flag (CTF) Platform and Exercises for an Intro to Computer Security Class

Abstract

Cybersecurity education is becoming increasingly important as demand for cybersecurity professionals increases. Hands-on skills are a critical component of cybersecurity education, and a variety of exercise types have been developed to teach these skills. In this work, we seek to apply the benefits of gamified learning to an introductory cybersecurity curriculum in the form of a set of Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges offered as hands-on exercises for an intro-level course. We created 20 jeopardy-style challenges of varying difficulty based on prior research on the use of gamification in education, and we configured the open-source CTFd platform to host our challenges. Student responses to post-challenge surveys suggest that the CTF component of the course was effective in improving perceived learning and student engagement.