Building an Ethical Hacking Site for Learning and Student Engagement

This research investigates the use of build-your-own capture the flag ethical hacking simulations to help learners engage and understand penetration testing methodologies. Students in a senior level ungraduated ethical hacking class were tasked with the development of a capture the flag platform that scored participants' progress while exploiting a vulnerable web site. Remediation of the found vulnerabilities was also demonstrated to illustrate secure coding best practices. This work chronicles the development of one of the CTF platforms and the process used to develop it.