Teaching a Hands-On CTF-Based Web Application Security Course

Abstract

American philosopher John Dewey, in one of his most famous theories about the hands-on approach to learning, said that practical problem-solving and theoretical teaching should go hand-in-hand. This means students must interact with their environment to adapt and learn. Today, we almost take for granted that laboratory classes are an essential part of teaching science and engineering. Specific to cybersecurity, an integral piece of any training is the opportunity to work in an interactive hands-on environment: problem-solving skills are best developed in this fashion. In this paper, we present a hands-on web application security course based on OWASP Top 10 that allows students to learn through real-life experience. The virtual laboratories provided in our course simulate common vulnerabilities and issues mapped directly from OWASP Top 10, allowing students to be well-prepared for most of the critical security risks to web applications that arise in the real world. To examine how practical knowledge affects the learning experience and to measure the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we gathered learning data (such as the number of tries and the execution time for each exercise) from our cybersecurity course applied to a group of students at our university. Then, we examined correlations between students’ results and gathered statistics. In our research, we made use of a CTF-based approach, which is known as a valuable pedagogical tool for providing students with real-life problems and helping them gain more practical skills, knowledge, and expertise in the cybersecurity field.