Cyber-security gamification in federation of cyber ranges: design, implementation, and evaluation

Cyber-security gamification in federation of cyber ranges: design, implementation, and evaluation

연구 분야: Safety

학회: International Journal of Information Security

A novel gamification system is presented in this paper, which receives data from cyber-security training platforms and federated cyber range environments, aggregates them, and applies properly designed scoring techniques. A communication schema is defined, to allow the proposed system and distinct platforms to share training data with each other; messages relevant to the gamification techniques are also provided. Furthermore, as part of the system, a game-scoring algorithm is proposed to accurately monitor the trainees’ performance in cyber-security exercises hosted in a training platform, a single cyber range, or a federation thereof, and it has been excessively tested in a real-world testbed, with a large number of security professionals being trained across different platforms, allowing rich insights and comparative analyses of data to be performed. The proposed approach delivers a fully dynamic and scalable system, along with typical mechanisms for communicating with (federated) cyber range environments. Both the proposed algorithm and the system underwent evaluation, with the former being compared to commonly used algorithms, demonstrating superior performance, high adaptability for different exercises and platform needs, and fairness for trainees, while the latter being assessed against a number of KPIs for two real-world scenarios, showcasing high efficiency in resource utilization, high performance, and high scalability.