cyber.abz

In today’s online world, the importance of cybersecurity is ever-increasing. It feels like a company is hacked every other week. To combat this issue, the overall education level of computer science and cybersecurity in particular has drastically increased over the past years – on a technical front, as well as an awareness front. In Switzerland, education in media and computer science already starts in primary schools. With education starting this early, proper tools are vital for the implementation of a sustainable learning experience.

Various platforms exist which teach computer science and specifically topics of cybersecurity to their users. However, most of these platforms are either focusing on furthering the education of existing industry professionals, or they are used in a leisure setting to host various cybersecurity-related challenges. The little number of platforms which are actually targeting a younger and/or less experienced audience mostly still have a rather high entry barrier, as they require the set-up of additional software and potentially depend on existing programming knowledge.

This project introduces a novel learning platform which focuses on teaching cybersecurity topics to high school students. The platform is fully browser-based and does not require any prior programming experience, thus removing the entry barrier of existing platforms. For now, it consists of two components: the lesson center and a target application. The former holds various lessons which can be worked through by the students, while the latter serves as a playground for the students to apply their newly learned knowledge and experiment with their own ideas. Helper tools in the lesson center provide useful information about the student’s interaction with the target application.

In the current implementation, a social media network serves as the target application, while an HTTP request inspector serves as a helper tool in the lesson center. Through the interactive lessons, the students are guided towards exploiting the vulnerabilities of the social media network. The students need to answer questions and solve interactive tasks to progress in the lessons and come closer to their ultimate goal: gain full access to another account. While the social media network has intended vulnerabilities, the system is created with multiple safeguards such that students cannot gain access to each others accounts. This makes the tool a great fit for any high school classroom.