TALOS: An Empirical Approach to Building Portable Hands-On Labs for Fundamental Cybersecurity Education Using Open-Source
摘要
The number and complexity of cyber attacks are increasing, making it very important to teach people of all ages and skill levels about cybersecurity. To address this issue, teaching methods are changing to include both basic ideas and practical, hands-on activities. Following well-known guidelines like CAE-C, REWIRE, and CSEC2017, we created a hands-on course that helps trainees learn practical skills, such as analyzing network data, finding website weaknesses, detecting attacks, making systems stronger, analyzing malware, and doing digital forensics. In this paper, we introduce a simple and organized way to teach beginner-level cybersecurity using open-source tools. We developed a portable and easy-to-use practice system called TALOS, which helps people learn important topics in operating systems and network security. TALOS was used in 19 training sessions with 367 participants, including university students and the general public. Survey results showed that most trainees were very satisfied, with 81.7% giving strong positive feedback about the training. These results suggest that portable, hands-on labs like TALOS are an effective and practical way to teach basic cybersecurity and could be used as a model for future training programs.