Using Amazon EC2 in Computer and Network Security Lab Exercises: Design, Results, and Analysis
Chuan Yue, Weiying Zhu, Gregory Williams, Edward Chow · 2020
Abstract Using Amazon EC2 in Computer and Network Security Lab Exercises: Design, Results, and AnalysisThere is no doubt that cloud computing has become a reality. People talk about it, spend moneyon it, and gain substantial benefit from it. In response to this significant trend in computing, ourengineering college encourages faculty members to use cloud computing services such as AWS(Amazon Web Services) in teaching computer science and engineering courses. On the onehand, we can better prepare our students for their future careers in a cloud computing world; onthe other hand, we can effectively address the resource limitation of our existing labenvironments and meanwhile ease the burden our IT professionals who maintain the existinginfrastructure.Hands-on lab exercises play an important role in teaching a computer and network securitycourse because they can help students apply basic security principles and techniques to theprotection of real world computer and network systems. In our computer and network securitycourse, each student is required to perform four realistic lab exercises: an IDS (IntrusionDetection System) lab exercise, a firewall lab exercise, a Web security lab exercise, and asoftware vulnerability exploitation lab exercise.In this paper, we present our experience in enabling students to use Amazon EC2 (ElasticCompute Cloud) to perform lab exercises of our computer and network security course. The freeusage of AWS cloud infrastructure for this course is enabled by an AWS Teaching Grantawarded to the instructor.We mainly present the following three aspects of our experience. First, we detail the design ofthose four lab exercises. The design includes the content of the lab exercises, the setup of AWSstudent accounts and lab environments, and the general instruction on creating and using EC2instances. Second, we present the results of performing those lab exercises by our students. Wedescribe and discuss how well they perform those lab exercises, what are the special difficultiesencountered by students, and what are other issues observed by us. Finally, we analyze thequestionnaires answered by our students. From the responses to close-ended questions, weanalyze whether students feel it is convenient to use AWS EC2, whether they like to use cloudcomputing services to perform lab exercises in this and other computer and engineering courses,and so on. From open-ended questionnaires, we analyze and discuss any other comments andsuggestions provided by students.The experience presented in this paper is very valuable to faculty members of our engineeringcollege for moving more lab exercises into the cloud. We believe that it is also valuable to othereducators who plan to use cloud computing services such as AWS EC2 in their computer andengineering courses. Some discussions regarding student accounts and EC2 instancemanagement could also be valuable to cloud computing service providers for adding newfeatures or improving existing features.