Cybot: A Chatbot for Teaching and Testing Cybersecurity Courses

As technology advances and public awareness of cybersecurity grows, protecting data and promoting cybersecurity best practices is essential. Educational chatbots were developed to address this need, but current systems respond artificially and lack user-friendliness, resulting in a bad user experience. This paper presents Cybot, a chatbot specifically designed to tackle this gap in cybersecurity education for university students. Cybot can answer cybersecurity questions, offer human-like interactions, provide assessments to improve students’ understanding and performance and provide emotional support with its motivational personality. Additionally, it decreases the workload of academic staff due to its constant availability and instant replies. An experiment was conducted on 30 university students to evaluate Cybot’s performance. The results showed positive feedback as users reported that Cybot was effective and a supportive study partner who always responded to their inquiries at any time.