SecLab: An Innovative Approach to Learn and Understand Current Security and Privacy Issues

Security and privacy are crucial for all IT systems and services. The diversity of applications places high demands on the knowledge and experience of software developers and IT professionals. Besides programming skills, security and privacy aspects are required as well and must be considered during development. If developers have not been trained in these topics, it is especially difficult for them to prevent problematic security issues such as vulnerabilities. In this work we present an interactive e-learning platform focusing on solving real-world cybersecurity tasks in a sandboxed web environment. With our platform students can learn and understand how security vulnerabilities can be exploited in different scenarios. The platform has been evaluated in four university IT security courses with around 1100 participants over three years.