Teaching Security With Network Testbeds

Network security topics are gaining importance but they are often taught using traditional, passive methods via lectures and textbooks. This paper describes our efforts to change this situation by developing teaching materials and technical support for use of network testbeds in security education. This practice cannot replace the traditional teaching approach but should complement it to better train our future security workforce. We describe our work on both the education and testbed support fronts and offer some preliminary success measures derived from observing the usage of DETER testbed and our materials in Fall 2010.