An authoring process to construct docker containers to help instructors develop cybersecurity exercises

As instructors, we are more likely to use exercises that we can modify or that we helped to develop. The problem we address is how to help instructors create their own hands-on exercises. This paper describes the authoring process for the creation of cybersecurity exercises and the experience of creating two very different exercises. One of these exercises is about vulnerable Web services and leverages the LAMP stack and the other is about cryptography and ransomware and uses VNC. They both use Terraform to create Docker containers. We address the issues of creating exercises that involve multiple containers and can be run in a cloud environment, as well as on a single server. This paper describes the process of creating these cybersecurity exercises in our framework. The streamlined process enabled the development of totally new exercises much faster than previously experienced. In the case of the ransomware exercise, it was two weeks from start to finish, compared to months for previous exercises.