On-Campus Hands-On Ethical Hacking Course

In this paper, we report on designing and deploying an on-campus, highly practical ethical hacking course using the foundation of Kungl. Tekniska Högskolan’s (KTH) existing, well-established, distance-based course. We explain our course organization, structure, and delivery and present the students’ formative and summative feedback and their results. Moreover, we justify the choice of our platform, a custom gcp-based cyber range with twelve capture the flag exercises designed for an online ethical hacking course, and how our on-campus course was implemented around it. Our ethical hacking course is organized around ten mandatory lectures, seven flag reports and three lectures on ethics, two demonstrations, and four guest lectures. The student evaluation is continuous and based on the flags captured. Our collected data indicates the amount of effort spent on each exercise, the used hints, and for how long most of the students were actively solving the exercises. The students’ feedback indicates they were overwhelmingly satisfied with the course elements and teaching staff. Finally, we propose changes to elements of our ethical hacking course. The course was delivered at Karlstad University over nine weeks between January and March 2023 for 24 students.