Harnessing the Cloud for Teaching Cybersecurity

Cloud computing has become an attractive paradigm for many organizations in government, industry as well as academia. In academia, the cloud can offer instructors and students (whether local or at a distance) on-demand, dedicated, isolated, unlimited, and easily configurable machines. Such an approach has clear advantages over access to machines in a classic lab setting. In this paper, we show how cloud services and infrastructure could be harnessed to facilitate practical experience and training for cybersecurity. We used the popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud; however, the use cases and approaches laid out in this paper are also applicable to other cloud providers.