Integrated Framework for Hands-on Cybersecurity Training: CyTrONE

In a world in which cyber-attacks occur on a daily basis, cybersecurity education and training are indispensable. Current training programs rely on manual setup and configuration for hands-on activities, which is a tedious and error-prone task. In this paper we present CyTrONE, an integrated cybersecurity training framework that we designed and implemented to address such shortcomings. The key insight is automating the training content generation and environment setup tasks. The advantages of this approach are: (i) improve the accuracy of the training setup; (ii) decrease the setup time and cost; (iii) make training possible repeatedly, and for a large number of participants. In the paper we thoroughly discuss the architecture and implementation of the framework, and we evaluate it from several perspectives in order to demonstrate that CyTrONE meets the aforementioned objectives.