Theses and Dissertations Collection

Cyber defense competitions provide students with a hands-on, real world opportunity to learn, practice, and perform the tasks which they will be expected to complete in the workplace. Cyber defense competitions include red-blue exercises (attack-defend), capture the flag competitions, level based challenges, and environment configuration type activities. The availability of current training material for cyber defense competitions is limited, especially when considering the subset of materials which are targeted for cyber defense competitions, freely available, and modifiable for extended use. CYbersecurity Oriented Training Environment and Exercises (CYOTEE) is a project intended to fill the need for preparatory material targeted for traditional cyber defense competitions. The project is freely available with all content downloadable from the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/CenterForSecureAndDependableSystems/CYOTEE.

The specific contributions described in this thesis are nine laboratory exercises: six handson and three discussion-based. These exercises task the participants with completing various competition relevant challenges. Each laboratory exercise includes the following sections: (1) a specification for any prerequisite technology needed, (2) learning objectives, (3) a mapping to relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities from the NIST NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, (4) background necessary to complete the exercise, (5) the expected completion time, (6) configuration and setup steps needed which includes an initialization script where needed, (7) the challenges for the exercise, and (8) solutions to the challenges. The topics for the laboratory exercises in CYOTEE are directly motivated by common topics at cyber defense competitions. While the project is specifically targeted for competition preparation, it addresses core cybersecurity concepts which can be utilized outside of competition preparation or the academic environment.