CyberAIMs: A tool for teaching adversarial and systems thinking

Abstract

CyberAIMs stands for Cyber Agents’ Interactive Modeling and Simulation. We designed this tool in order to use it as an educational tool to teach Master students in a Cyber security course. This paper aims to describe the model and explain the design choices behind CyberAIMs in terms of associating them with the emerging concepts within cyber security curriculum, namely adversarial and systems thinking. The preliminary results indicate that the current distribution of values and entities allows most of the defense agents to avoid losing all their resources to their attack counterparts. We intend to use this tool as part of a lab with students in Information Security and further extend our target users, by including others who need training in adversarial and systems thinking. We conclude by providing rough results from running simulations with the tool and giving further directions of our future research, in order to improve the usability and level of detail for this tool.