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International Symposium on Human Aspects of Information Security and Assurance

HAISA 2023: Human Aspects of Information Security and Assurance pp 76–90Cite as

On-Campus Hands-On Ethical Hacking Course

Design, Deployment and Lessons Learned

Part of the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology book series (IFIPAICT,volume 674)

Abstract

In this paper, we report on designing and deploying an on-campus, highly practical ethical hacking course using the foundation of Kungl. Tekniska Högskolan’s (KTH) existing, well-established, distance-based course. We explain our course organization, structure, and delivery and present the students’ formative and summative feedback and their results. Moreover, we justify the choice of our platform, a custom gcp-based cyber range with twelve capture the flag exercises designed for an online ethical hacking course, and how our on-campus course was implemented around it. Our ethical hacking course is organized around ten mandatory lectures, seven flag reports and three lectures on ethics, two demonstrations, and four guest lectures. The student evaluation is continuous and based on the flags captured. Our collected data indicates the amount of effort spent on each exercise, the used hints, and for how long most of the students were actively solving the exercises. The students’ feedback indicates they were overwhelmingly satisfied with the course elements and teaching staff. Finally, we propose changes to elements of our ethical hacking course. The course was delivered at Karlstad University over nine weeks between January and March 2023 for 24 students.

Keywords

  • Ethical hacking
  • education
  • ethics
  • cybersecurity
  • capture the flag

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www3.kau.se/kursplaner/en/DVAD25_20231_en.pdf.

  2. 2.

    https://www.hackthebox.com/ and https://tryhackme.com/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.uscyberrange.org/ and https://jyvsectec.fi/cyber-range/.

  4. 4.

    https://darknetdiaries.com/, episodes 47, 49, 82, 87, and 88.

  5. 5.

    https://www.mentimeter.com/.

  6. 6.

    The Erasmus students do not receive the link.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/CTFd/CTFd.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Pontus Jonhson, Nikolaos Kakouros, and Sotirios Katsikeas from kth for sharing their cyber range and invaluable expertise and guidance. Additionally, we are grateful for the support of our colleague Tobias Vehkajärvi. Our ethical hacking course was influenced, in part, by our experience in developing courses on vulnerability analysis and moocs [2, 8].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Leonardo A. Martucci, Jonathan Magnusson & Mahdi Akil

Authors
  1. Leonardo A. Martucci
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  2. Jonathan Magnusson
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  3. Mahdi Akil
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Leonardo A. Martucci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Steven Furnell

  2. University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

    Nathan Clarke

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Martucci, L.A., Magnusson, J., Akil, M. (2023). On-Campus Hands-On Ethical Hacking Course. In: Furnell, S., Clarke, N. (eds) Human Aspects of Information Security and Assurance. HAISA 2023. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 674. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38530-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38530-8_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-38529-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-38530-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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