Hit ’em where it hurts: a live security exercise on cyber situational awareness

Live security exercises are a powerful educational tool to motivate students to excel and foster research and develop-ment of novel security solutions. Our insight is to design a live security exercise to provide interesting datasets in a specific area of security research. In this paper we validated this insight, and we present the design of a novel kind of live security competition centered on the concept of Cyber Situ-ational Awareness. The competition was carried out in De-cember 2010, and involved 72 teams (900 students) spread across 16 countries, making it the largest educational live security exercise ever performed. We present both the inno-vative design of this competition and the novel dataset we collected. In addition, we define Cyber Situational Aware-ness metrics to characterize the toxicity and effectiveness of the attacks performed by the participants with respect to the missions carried out by the targets of the attack. 1