Hands-on Exercises for IT Security Education

Abstract

We have developed a collection of instructional hands-on lab assignments that can be used to help teach security courses or courses with a security component in information technology (IT). Our labs cover a wide spectrum of principles, ideas and technologies along with well-developed open source tools. Lab descriptions are publicly accessible from our web page. All of the labs have been tested in a virtual environment and utilized in our security courses. Feedback from the students has been positive. In this paper, we will present the lab design, topics covered in our labs, lab environments and student evaluation results. We will share our experience in transferring advanced technology to IT security education and lessons learned from this practice.