Cybercompetitions: A survey of competitions, tools, and systems to support cybersecurity education

Abstract

Over the last decade, industry and academia have worked towards raising students’ interests in cybersecurity through game-like competitions to fill a shortfall of cybersecurity professionals. Rising interest in video games in combination with gamification techniques make learning fun, easy, and addictive. It is crucial that cybersecurity curricula enhance and expose cybersecurity education to a diversified student body to meet workforce demands. Gamification through cybercompetitions is one method to achieve that. With a vast list of options for competition type, focus areas, learning outcomes, and participant experience levels we need to systematize knowledge of attributes that ameliorate cybercompetitions. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lock-downs, competition hosts scrambled to move platforms from local to online infrastructure due to poor interoperability between competition software. We derive a list of takeaways including the lack of interoperability between state-of-the-art competition systems, breaking the high knowledge barrier to participate, addressing competition type diversity, then suggest potential solutions and research questions moving forward. Our paper aims to systematize cybersecurity, access control, and programming competitions by surveying the history of these events. We explore the types of competitions that have been hosted and categorize them based on focus areas related to the InfoSEC Color Wheel. We then explore state-of-the-art technologies that enable these types of competitions, and finally, present our takeaways.