Cybersecurity Awareness Platform with Virtual Coach and Automated Challenge Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cybersecurity awareness platform with a virtual AI coach and automated challenge assessment to enhance secure coding skills among developers, supporting remote and offline training.

Contribution

It presents a novel platform combining an interactive game, virtual coaching, and automatic challenge evaluation to improve secure software development training.

Findings

Positive acceptance by real-world users

Platform effectively trains secure coding skills

Supports remote and offline cybersecurity training

Abstract

Over the last years, the number of cyber-attacks on industrial control systems has been steadily increasing. Among several factors, proper software development plays a vital role in keeping these systems secure. To achieve secure software, developers need to be aware of secure coding guidelines and secure coding best practices. This work presents a platform geared towards software developers in the industry that aims to increase awareness of secure software development. The authors also introduce an interactive game component, a virtual coach, which implements a simple artificial intelligence engine based on the laddering technique for interviews. Through a survey, a preliminary evaluation of the implemented artifact with real-world players (from academia and industry) shows a positive acceptance of the developed platform. Furthermore, the players agree that the platform is adequate for training their secure coding skills. The impact of our work is to introduce a new automatic challenge evaluation method together with a virtual coach to improve existing cybersecurity awareness training programs. These training workshops can be easily held remotely or off-line.