Crowdsourcing approach for developing hands-on experiments in cybersecurity education

The operational skills are essential for the cybersecurity practitioners and the hands-on experiments can be utilized to train their practical skills. As malicious attacks are continually changing and new vulnerability appears quickly with the increasing number of new software, it has been a challenging problem to develop hands-on experiments rapidly and continuously which are consistent with realistic threat scenarios. Normally, skilled engineers are familiar with threat scenarios and the attack/defense skills, but they have no motivation to develop hands-on experiments for education. In contrast, the faculties are good at teaching and training but they have no resource or experience to deploy lots of hands-on experiments by themselves. In this paper, we propose a framework called RC²F by adopting the crowdsourcing approach, which acts as a platform for the engineers and the faculties as well as channels between them for resource exchanging. In the framework, we also introduce two incentive models to motivate the participants, where the constructor-oriented Forward Incentive Model (FIM for short) encourages the engineers by the incentive mechanism and the demand-oriented Backward Incentive Model (BIM for short) balances the educational resources for the faculties. We also provide a comprehensive case based on the practical data to analyze the proposed framework. And the results validate that the proposed framework as well as the FIM and BIM models can address the challenge in developing hands-on experiments.