NetsBlox and Wireless Robots Make Cybersecurity Fun

摘要

NetsBlox (https://netsblox.org) is a web-based collaborative learning environment extending Snap! with a few carefully selected abstractions that enable students to create distributed applications. These include online multi-player games and client-server applications that access online STEAM data such as maps, weather, earthquakes, movie information, etc. The distributed computing abstractions supported by NetsBlox also make it possible to write robot control programs. These programs issue wireless commands to the robots which in turn reply with acknowledgements and sensor readings. The programs run in the browser making debugging much easier and eliminating the need to download anything to the robots. Furthermore, the environment makes it possible for other users to eavesdrop on the wireless messages and hijack the robots of others. This provides an excellent motivation for cybersecurity and makes it easy to teach it in a hands-on manner. We have created a cybersecurity curriculum for a week-long summer camp for high school students. Lessons include Denial of Service attacks, their detection and mitigation, cryptography, secure key exchange, replay attacks, etc. Each day student teams solve challenge problems that their robots have to carry out while under cyber-attack by the other participants. This technology demonstration is a companion to the paper "Teaching Cybersecurity with Networked Robots." It will provide the audience with a more practical view of this novel approach to hands-on cybersecurity education.