Teaching Network Traffic Matrices in an Interactive Game Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive game environment designed to teach network traffic matrices, making complex concepts accessible and engaging for students and professionals through easily customizable modules.

Contribution

It presents a novel, flexible game-based platform for teaching network traffic matrices, filling a gap in online cybersecurity education resources.

Findings

Developed a modular, JSON-based game environment for traffic matrix education.

Created initial training modules covering key concepts and attack scenarios.

Enables rapid deployment and feedback for educational improvement.

Abstract

The Internet has become a critical domain for modern society that requires ongoing efforts for its improvement and protection. Network traffic matrices are a powerful tool for understanding and analyzing networks and are broadly taught in online graph theory educational resources. Network traffic matrix concepts are rarely available in online computer network and cybersecurity educational resources. To fill this gap, an interactive game environment has been developed to teach the foundations of traffic matrices to the computer networking community. The game environment provides a convenient, broadly accessible, delivery mechanism that enables making material available rapidly to a wide audience. The core architecture of the game is a facility to add new network traffic matrix training modules via an easily editable JSON file. Using this facility an initial set of modules were rapidly created covering: basic traffic matrices, traffic patterns, security/defense/deterrence, a notional cyber attack, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, and a variety of graph theory concepts. The game environment enables delivery in a wide range of contexts to enable rapid feedback and improvement. The game can be used as a core unit as part of a formal course or as a simple interactive introduction in a presentation.