Emerging Trends in ICT Security: Chapter 31. Cyber Security Education: The Merits of Firewall Exercises (Emerging Trends in Computer Science and Applied Computing)

Educational tools related to firewalls and firewall configurations are central to the development of cybersecurity education, due to the integral role firewalls play in this field. To assess the current state of firewall education, we developed a set of criteria that educational exercises should meet. They should be competitive, interactive, extensible, and approachable. These criteria were then applied to three existing firewall exercises in order to gauge their strengths and weaknesses. With that information in mind, we then looked to emerging trends in firewalls and firewall education. We found that many of the emerging trends align with our criteria, but diverge from them in other important ways.