Our Cyber Taxi paper, which was presented at the ESORICS 2020 workshop MSTEC, is also available on arXiv.
The lack of guided exercises and practical opportunities to learn about cybersecurity in a practical way makes it difficult for security experts to improve their proficiency. Capture the Flag events and Cyber Ranges are ideal for cybersecurity training. Thereby, the participants usually compete in teams against each other, or have to defend themselves in a specific scenario. As organizers of yearly events, we present a taxonomy for interactive cyber training and education. The proposed taxonomy includes different factors of the technical setup, audience, training environment, and training setup. By the comprehensive taxonomy, different aspects of interactive training are considered. This can help trainings to improve and to be established successfully. The provided taxonomy is extendable and can be used in further application areas as research on new security technologies.
Our paper “Cyber Taxi: A Taxonomy of Interactive Cyber Training and Education Systems” describes various factors such as technical setup, participants, training environment and training setup. This detailed breakdown helps the organizers to think about all the important aspects. For example, the participant factor is important to determine the content of the training. The reason for the training includes awareness, skill, collaboration, communication and leadership. Improving coordination expects different tasks than when it comes to expanding specialist knowledge. Accordingly, the content has to be adapted to the different audiences, from students to IT specialists and management. The level of competence, in turn, has a direct impact on the level of difficulty and the type of task.