CHEESE: Cyber Human Ecosystem of Engaged Security Education

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents CHEESE, a platform for cybersecurity education that complements formal classroom instruction with hands-on experience. With the ubiquitous use of computing devices and applications today, the protection of personal and privileged information is a persistent challenge. Modern software applications are typically complex pieces of code that borrow from various preexisting software libraries. Consequently, a flaw in one piece of software can have far-reaching and often unintended security implications that malicious actors can exploit. Thus, cybersecurity education needs to be transformed from a purely academic enterprise for cybersecurity researchers into a necessary skill that is imparted to the current and future IT workforce at large. CHEESE aims to impart such skills. CHEESE is composed of CHEESEHub, a public web-platform hosting demonstrations of cybersecurity concepts, a set of lessons complementing the demonstrations, and a community-driven approach to the contribution of new demonstrations and lessons. CHEESE is intended to supplement and enhance traditional cybersecurity education with hands-on training that has been shown to improve concept retention and understanding. Instructors can incorporate CHEESE into their teaching in several ways: by utilizing one or more of the demonstrations hosted on the publicly-accessible CHEESEHub in conjunction with the web-accessible lessons; by deploying their own version of CHEESEHub with a custom set of demonstrations and lessons; or by developing their own lesson plan which borrows from and combines one or more demonstrations on CHEESEHub. The use of CHEESEHub only requires a web-browser and can hence be employed in a wide variety of educational and training settings from K-12 schools through university.