Integrated framework for hands-on cybersecurity training: CyTrONE

Hands-on cybersecurity education and training activities are critical given that cyberattacks occur nowadays on an ever-increasing scale. Only such practical activities can ensure that trainees will acquire the actual skills necessary to promptly deal with security incidents in real-life situations. However, current programs rely significantly on the manual setup and configuration of the learning and/or training environments used, which is a tedious, inefficient and error-prone approach. In this paper, we present an integrated cybersecurity training framework, named CyTrONE, that we designed and implemented to address such shortcomings by automating the training content generation and environment setup tasks. After we discuss the architecture and implementation of the framework, we demonstrate the framework effectiveness by evaluating it from both functionality and performance perspectives. Our results show that CyTrONE is well-suited for actual training activities in terms of features, usability and execution performance. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.