A Customized Educational Booster for Online Students in Cybersecurity

Education

Mohamed Rahouti

1,4 a

and Kaiqi Xiong

2,3,4 b

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, U.S.A.

Cyber Florida, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, U.S.A.

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, U.S.A.

Intelligent Computer Networking and Security Lab, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, U.S.A.

Keywords:

Cyber Security, Applied Cryptography, Computer Networking and Security, Virtual Environment, Online

Teaching.

Abstract:

Real-world lab experiments have been an integral part of computer science and engineering curriculums.

However, human and computing resources as well as ﬁnancial support to courses may be limited at many

universities ranging from small to large universities and from liberal arts colleges to top research universities

as there is a dramatic increase of student enrollments in computer science and engineering for the past ten

years. Nowadays, like many other universities nation wide, University of South Florida (USF) in collabo-

ration with the Cyber Florida center offers online cyber security degrees as well as certiﬁcates. Throughout

such programs, online students are expected to acquire knowledge via an interdisciplinary set of core courses

prior to taking a deep dive into one of four following concentrations: cyber intelligence, digital forensics,

information assurance and computer security fundamentals. However, when it comes to training student with

real-world cyber security labs, both instructors and students face various challenges with regard to resources

and virtual environment for exploring and running a broad range of security experiments and tests. In order

to achieve the goal of our funded NSF project, in this paper we will discuss our teaching contributions to the

development of a broad range of cyber security labs, facilitation of applied cryptography learning through

experimental modules, and our customized virtual machine that ﬁts the needs of various online computer

networking and security courses. Speciﬁcally, we will ﬁrst present our methodology for the design of our

experimental modules and then present in details our pre-built Linux-based portable virtual machine. Those

learning and experimental modules have been developed at different levels to meet the need of students with

different academic and industrial backgrounds.

1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, technological advances have lead

to revolutionary improvement and facilitation of e-

learning through smart educational systems. There-

fore, it becomes very important to beﬁt a broad range

of subjects and teaching materials into curriculums

that fulﬁl the industrial and technological require-

ments and goals (Bauer et al., 2018).

Moreover, because of the dramatic increase of all

technologies and practices of computer systems and

electronic data, living in a world where more and

more of our social lives and business are online, cyber

security is an enormously growing area.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9701-5505

https://orcid.org/1111-2222-3333-4444

In the past, people widely considered cyber se-

curity as an IT department’s responsibility. It

was naively thought that as long as proper security

tools and software (e.g., ﬁrewall, antivirus, encryp-

tion/decryption protocols, etc.) were put in place,

people could just neglect concerns security problems

and left them for IT departments to deal with.

These days, the international research and advi-

sory ﬁrm, GartnerInc., estimates spending on secu-

rity worldwide to pass 96.3 billion dollars by the end

of 2018, which is about 8% increase within one year.

In addition, for the last several years, the need for

shielding and protecting information from illegitimate

usage/access and malicious actors has evolved at the

highest levels of institutions, business and govern-

ment.

Rahouti, M. and Xiong, K.

A Customized Educational Booster for Online Students in Cybersecurity Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0007767205350541

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 535-541

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

535

Moreover, with an increasing cybercrimes that af-

fect the government, individuals, and organizations,

online cyber security certiﬁcates or degrees help re-

mote students (could even be overseas in military du-

ties sometimes) to pursue new opportunities that per-

mit them to contribute in maintaining information and

data secure from illegitimate usage. In the online

teaching, the curricula must align with the material

on cyber security certiﬁcation exams such as Certiﬁed

Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP),

Security +, and Information Systems Audit and Con-

trol Association (ISACA) exams. Therefore, the cur-

ricula should be designed in a suitable way to beﬁt

hands-on skills and requirements of cyber security

industry, whereas the university must guarantee the

availability of all necessary tools and resources for

students to practice and apply teaching material rel-

evant to the workplace.

However, there exist various difﬁculties and key

challenges with regard to the teaching of cyber se-

curity in the educational structure of online courses.

These difﬁculties range from, but are not limited to,

the broad range of student backgrounds and availabil-

ity of computing resources (e.g., computers, network

devices, software). Based on our past teaching expe-

rience of the Applied Cryptography, a core course in

the curriculum of the online cyber security program at

the University of South Florida, students enroll in the

program with weak computer science and mathemat-

ics background, for example, without the completion

of some basic computer science courses, such as oper-

ating system basics, computer networking fundamen-

tals, computer programming skills, etc. According to

a recent survey we conducted in our course, more than

70% of total students do not have any computer sci-

ence and security background, where many students

come from a completely unrelated educational back-

ground, e.g., sociology, business, music studies.

Moreover, the insufﬁciency and or even lack of

hardware resources at universities (i.e. computer labs)

is another grand challenge that limits students capa-

bility to practice advanced cyber security labs. Stu-

dents are not in local, so it is very inconvenient or

even infeasible for students to come to the univer-

sity campus to work on their assigned labs. These

remote students could be overseas in military duties

or work displacement, which renders it impossible

for them to utilize physical labs at the Such key chal-

lenges place obstacles for implementations of suitable

infrastructure of such smart teaching. Furthermore,

difﬁculties of guaranteeing virtual resources, such as

remote virtual access to computers in physical com-

puter labs might even aggravate when labs require

multiple machines for running fundamental security

experiments (e.g., Client-sever communication, intru-

sion detection systems, Denial of Service and Dis-

tributed Denial of Service attacks, and Man-in-the-

Middle attack), or even powerful computation and

networking resources (e.g., hardware memory and In-

ternet speed).

In our past teaching for different cyber security

courses and workshops, we have developed a broad

range of hands-on labs. Our readily-available experi-

mental labs are conducted in our own pre-built virtual

machine image as we have installed and customized

all the necessary libraries, tools, and software that are

needed to accomplish such a diverse range of secu-

rity and cryptography labs. Students only need to be

handed our virtual machine and run it on their own

computers using a cross-platform virtualization ap-

plication (e.g., VirtualBox and VMware) that will let

them run our virtual operating system on their com-

puters.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Sec-

tion 2 presents an explanatory and detailed overview

of some efforts that were done in the past to enhance

and facilitate online cyber security learning experi-

ence. Section 3 then presents our research efforts to-

wards the development of a broad range of cyber se-

curity labs and experimental modules, as well as our

developed virtual environment for online computer

networking and security courses in general and on-

line Applied Cryptography in particular in order to

achieve the goal of our funded NSF project. In Sec-

tion 4 we present a taxonomic overview of students

experience assessment. Finally, in Section 5 we dis-

cuss our future work. We then conclude our research

study in Section 6.

2 RELATED WORK

In the past, many online educators have investi-

gated the advantages and disadvantages of online

courses (Kinnunen and Eriksson, 2018). The pros and

cons strictly rely on all parties of the online instruc-

tional process, instructors, students, and the univer-

sity.

In brief, Fedynich (Fedynich, 2013), Cook (Cook,

2007), and Baleni (Baleni, 2015) provided a taxo-

nomic overview of the advantages as: (1) ﬂexibil-

ity of where and when to study, (2) feasibility of a

broad range of teaching mechanisms, and (3) efﬁ-

ciency in term of cost for universities. Importantly,

Cook (Cook, 2007) highlighted more critical pros of

the online teaching, such as (1) the freedom for study

pace adjustment, (2) possibility of adopting particular

teaching techniques that are impractical in traditional

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

536

(face-to-face) teaching, such as virtual platforms and

virtual simulations (particular types of virtual labo-

ratory as presented in Figure 1), and (3) easiness of

delivering prompt and synchronous feedback and for-

mative performance assessments.

On the other hand, there are numerous cons and

challenges of online teaching. In summary, typical

online courses (1) impose students to have computers

and online access, as well as (2) might have a weak

instructional design and (3) scarcity of face-to-face

interactions that could lead to the poor performance

of students (Fedynich, 2013), (Cook, 2007).

Additionally, teaching an online cyber security

course is even more challenging. More challenges

might add-up to the aforementioned list. Such

courses require advanced resources, e.g., computa-

tionally powerful computers, cryptographic libraries

and software, and multiple physical hosts or virtual

machines for particular security experimentation sce-

narios. Therefore, it becomes more and more chal-

lenging to help students reach their full potential in

such online cyber security core courses.

Concentrating on our online Applied Cryptog-

raphy for higher education (HE) involves topics

on secure software development, digital signatures,

symmetric-key/asymmetric-key encryptions, and eth-

ical hacking. Such topics must be accompanied with

hands-on lab modules and exercises to better help stu-

dents with understanding and practicing the course

concepts and material (Topham et al., 2016). It has

been used in education as well Xiong et al

Willems and Meinel (Willems and Meinel, 2012)

presented a software-based solution to evaluate prac-

tical cyber security labs and experiments in an on-

line laboratory-based on a virtual machine technol-

ogy. Herein, the authors guaranteed a formal pa-

rameterization of lab scenarios and implementation

of a dynamic toolkit for re-conﬁguring virtual ma-

chines and therefore adopted the training environment

with according to the deﬁned parameters. Xiong and

Pan (Xiong and Pan, 2013) presented an education

approach to deploy ProtoGENI, one of GENI testbed

resources, for teaching computer networking. Partic-

ularly, they have designed various capstone projects

and lab modules that provide students with an op-

portunity to utilize a real-world testbed for different

learning and research purposes.

While Sharma and Sefchek (Sharma and Se-

fchek, 2007) surveyed different types of laboratories

for cyber security teaching and learning, Mirkovic

and Benzel (Mirkovic and Benzel, 2012) introduced

DeterL ab, an open Emulab-based technology experi-

mental facility sponsored by the US National Science

Foundation and Department of Homeland Security.

This lab is hosted by USC/ISI and UC Berkeley. This

experimental facility is dedicated for online cyber se-

curity teaching, where students can reserve available

nodes (out of 400 computing nodes in total) through a

web-based interface. However, the students are only

permitted to posses the virtual sessions to these com-

puting nodes for a very short period of time in order

to grant as many users as possible access to the lab

resources.

Figure 1: Virtual laboratory hierarchy.

Differently from previous teaching efforts that lack

convenience and easiness for online cyber security

teaching. In this paper, we discuss and detail our

efﬁcient academic guidelines in offering a readily-

available virtual environment for online cyber secu-

rity teaching along with a broad range of cryptog-

raphy and cyber security-based labs, as well as our

learning and experimental modules. In our devel-

opment and implementation processes, we consider

students with various academic backgrounds where

many of these students might lack basic computer sci-

ence fundamentals and cyber security knowledge.

3 METHODOLOGY: ADOPTING

INNOVATIONS

The objectives of the education research discussed

here are to enhance the efﬁciency of teaching on-

line cyber security courses (even our own experience

was induced from our online Applied Cryptography

course at the University of South Florida). In par-

ticular, this study aims at developing convenient vir-

tual laboratory experiments that meet the needs of cy-

ber security students with different academic back-

grounds. Moreover, in our education research we in-

vestigate how our students interact with our teaching

A Customized Educational Booster for Online Students in Cybersecurity Education

537

Figure 2: Our customized pre-built open-source Linux-

based virtual machine.

methods and ready-to-use virtual environment for cy-

ber security lab experiments.

3.1 Lab Development

In the past few years, we have been offering Ap-

plied Cryptography, a core course for the fully on-

line cyber security program at the University of South

Florida. This course aims at familiarizing remote stu-

dents with common cryptographic building blocks,

including state-of-the art techniques to encrypt data,

digital signature schemes, and protocols for estab-

lishing secret keys across public networks. Students

are expected to understand the strengths and limita-

tions of common and widely used cryptographic se-

curity models, and how side-channel leakage in an

unprotected implementation can subvert a theoreti-

cally strong algorithm. At the end of this course,

students should know how cryptographic mechanisms

secure data in today’s computers and networks, and

how ”best practices” are applied to protect informa-

tion.

Therefore, in order to fulﬁl such curriculum ob-

jectives, we have been dedicating great efforts to de-

velop lab experiments that meet today’s cyber secu-

rity advances and needs. Given that in this program,

students usually have a very broad range of academic

backgrounds and many of them might even lack the

fundamentals of computer systems and cyber security,

and therefore, it is of a great challenge to provide labs

that align with the majority of student backgrounds.

Furthermore, universities are proven cumbersome

to respond to cyber security education needs. It is

widely common that computer science students have

to go through at least four years of the undergradu-

ate schooling without taking any mandatory course

on security (Cheung et al., 2011). Thus, such stu-

dents graduate without acquiring any knowledge of

cyber security. In addition, admission requirements

for graduate cyber security programs enrolment at

universities are not strictly imposed, and therefore

students with a weak background in computer sci-

ence are allowed in online graduate cyber security

programs.

To consider such weaknesses in student back-

grounds and to overcome the previously discussed

key challenges, inspired by existing advanced cyber

security labs such as SEEDLab projects (Du, 2011),

we develop our own labs with detailed step-by-step

instructions. These labs are shown in Table 1 and

mainly focus on applied cryptography, which cov-

ers three essential mechanisms in cryptography, in-

cluding secrete-key encryption, one-way hash func-

tion, public-key encryption and Public Key Infrastruc-

ture (PKI). Besides, we also cover vulnerabilities of

common cryptographic algorithms. Prior to assign-

ing these labs to students, we require them to ﬁnish

an introductory lab. This lab is about downloading

our virtual machine (it will be described in Subsec-

tion 3.2) and importing it into their own computers

after installing an open-source virtualization platform

(e.g., VMware and VirtualBox).

Moreover, we develop detailed Instructor Manu-

als. For the majority of our developed labs, we create

corresponding manuals, which are only for instructors

use. These manuals basically come from reports of

graduate teaching assistants and graduate research as-

sociates. These detailed reports describe how tasks of

each lab modules can be accomplished. These man-

uals are for the sake of assisting educators with the

preparation for their labs.

Figure 3: Our customized pre-built open-source Linux-

based virtual machine is equipped and pre-conﬁgured in a

convenient way to help students with a weak background to

get started on course labs. It also comes with all necessary

implementations of libraries and tools.

3.2 Virtual Environment

Implementation

In order to address the key challenges discussed in

Section 1, we have built a Linux-based virtual ma-

chine environment for students use in their lab exper-

iments by using Ubuntu with a variety of latest ver-

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

538

Table 1: A sample of our developed labs for Applied Cryptography course at the University of South Florida.

Lab Objectives Duration

(Hrs)

Getting started Virtual environment set up 5

Secret Key cryptog-

raphy

(1) Getting familiar with symmetric-key encryption (2)writing

programs to encrypt and decrypt different messages (3) Encryp-

tion modes (4) Encryption padding (5) Initial vectors (IV)

Hash functions and

MAC

Getting familiar with (1) hash functions and Message Authenti-

cation Code (MAC) (2) exploring strengths and weaknesses of

common hash functions properties

Digital certiﬁcates

and CA creation

Getting familiar with (1) digital certiﬁcates (2) create own cer-

tiﬁcate authority (CA) (3) signing and validation of digital cer-

tiﬁcates

sions for different semesters. For your information,

the virtual environments depicted in Figures 2 and 3

are screen-shots taken before and after students log

into the virtual machine, respectively. Based on dif-

ferent levels of students, we have provided the vir-

tual machines with different levels of conﬁgurations.

That is, students with better backgrounds receive less

conﬁgured virtual machines. Generally speaking, the

virtual machine environments are customized and ad-

justed to ﬁt our online teaching goals. They are pre-

conﬁgured in a convenient way to ﬁt students with

different background needs and shortages in hands-on

and computer science skills. Particularly, we imple-

ment all necessary libraries, packages, and software

that students need to work on our applied cyber secu-

rity labs. Moreover, our virtual machine is delivered

to students via the university course web page. All

what students need to do is downloading the virtual

machine and importing it into their own computers

without the need of changing any settings or param-

eterization. Such a ready-to-use virtual machine pro-

vides a portable environment for our remote students

such that they do not need to struggle with affording

computationally powerful computers and cyber secu-

rity software. Furthermore, this virtual environment

is equipped with all necessary material for labs ac-

complishment starting from labs manuals to directory

hierarchy for each corresponding lab and experimen-

tation modules.

Figure 4: Students performance before and after the devel-

opment of our own virtual environment and new lab mod-

ules (i.e., before and after Fall 2018, respectively).

4 EVALUATION

Figures 4 and 5 depict students assessment in our on-

line Applied Cryptography course for three semesters

in the last three years in a row, starting from Fall 2016

through Fall 2018. Stating that before 2018, we have

used existing SEEdLab (Du, 2011) machine along

with existing laboratories developed by the SEEDLab

project. Figure 4 shows that our students performance

has been enhanced since we offer them a convenient

and efﬁcient virtual environment along with newly

developed labs that meet the necessities and consid-

erations of weaknesses in student backgrounds. The

overall grades were signiﬁcantly improved whereas

the time spent on labs dramatically decreased.

Moreover, Figure 5 shows students assessment

of difﬁculty level of our labs for the same three

semesters between 2016 and 2018. The ﬁgure demon-

A Customized Educational Booster for Online Students in Cybersecurity Education

539

Figure 5: The feedback of our students in Applied Cryp-

tography course regarding the difﬁculty level of labs before

and after developing/implementing our new lab modules.

strates the satisfaction of our online cyber security

students with our newly developed lab modules. It

is obviously demonstrated that based on our student

assessments the difﬁculty level of these cyber se-

curity labs has been signiﬁcantly reduced. Noting

that throughout these successive semesters, our labs

cover the same tasks and experimentation scenarios.

The reason our newly introduced labs are less dif-

ﬁcult than previously used ones from the SEEDLab

project (Du, 2011) is that our virtual machine pro-

vides students with necessary demos, training exer-

cises, tutorials, and step-by-step manuals to under-

stand labs content, goals, and ﬁndings. These inte-

grated demos and manuals in our virtual machine are

intended to help students who need additional tuto-

rials and guidance to catch up on basic fundamen-

tals, such as Linux operating system, shell scripting,

OpenSSL library, etc.

5 DISCUSSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

Hands-on lab experiments have been an integral part

of computer science and engineering curriculums.

However, human and computing resources as well as

ﬁnancial support to courses may be limited at many

universities ranging from small to large universities

and from liberal arts colleges to top research univer-

sities as there is a dramatic increase of student en-

rollments in computer science and engineering for the

past ten years.

As future work for facilitating and improving

large-scale cyber security experimentation, we plan

to adopt the Global Environment for Network In-

novations (GENI), a real-world, repeatable, pro-

grammable, at-scale, virtual infrastructure for ex-

periments in a variety of computer science areas

such as networking, security, and distributed com-

puting sponsored by National Science Foundation

(NSF) (Berman et al., 2014), (Thomas et al., 2016),

(Riga et al., 2016), (Chin et al., 2018).

Furthermore, Software-Deﬁned Networking

(SDN) has been a core technology in cloud comput-

ing and other cyber-physical systems where SDN

facilitates network management and enables network

programmability and efﬁcient network conﬁguration

to improve network performance, monitoring, and

security (Chin et al., 2017). In our future work, we

will dedicate great efforts in the development of

GENI and SDN learning and experimental modules

for computer networking and security courses in

order to achieve the goal of today’s advanced cyber

security needs. Speciﬁcally, we will introduce our

methodology for the design of our modules and

then provide the details of GENI and SDN modules

including GENI account setup and resource reserva-

tion, measurement tool labs, as well as SDN labs for

network trafﬁc management and the detection and

mitigation of several well-known security attacks,

such as Denial of Service Attacks (DoS), Distributed

Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), phishing attacks,

and Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) malware

detection. Those learning and experimental modules

will be developed at different levels to meet the need

of students with different academic backgrounds.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In computer science and engineering curriculums,

hands-on lab experiments have been an integral part,

especially in cyber security paths. However, the key

challenges always relate to human and computing re-

sources as well as ﬁnancial support to such online

courses. These resources could be limited at many

higher education institutions ranging from small to

large colleges as there is a dramatic increase of stu-

dent enrollments in online cyber security programs

ranging from degrees to certiﬁcates.

In collaboration with the Cyber Florida center,

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

540

University of South Florida offers accredited online

cyber security programs. Throughout such online

programs, remote students have the opportunity to

gain knowledge through an interdisciplinary set of

core courses and then take a deep dive into the ﬁeld

of cyber security.

Therefore, in order to fulﬁl the industrial needs

of cyber security and while considering the afore-

mentioned challenges, in this paper, we have pre-

sented our great efforts in facilitating the learning pro-

cess of the online cyber security learning. Specif-

ically, we have presented our methodology for the

design of our modules and then given the detail of

our pre-built Linux-based portable virtual environ-

ment. Those learning and experimental modules have

been developed at different levels to meet the need of

students with different academic and industrial back-

grounds. Moreover, we provided an evaluation of

our teaching experience as well as students perfor-

mance in Applied Cryptography, the online cyber se-

curity course we have been teaching for the last few

years. Finally, in our future work, we will bring the

Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)

testbed in classroom and integrate it with this teach-

ing design and even conduct advanced computer net-

working and security laboratories.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the National Sci-

ence Foundation (NSF) who partially sponsored the

work under grants #1620868, #1620871, #1620862,

#1651280, and BBN/GPO project #1936 through

NSF/CNS grant. The views and conclusions con-

tained herein are those of the authors and should not

be interpreted as necessarily representing the ofﬁcial

policies, either expressed or implied of NSF.

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