The Impact of the NSA Cyber Defense Exercise on the Curriculum at the Air Force Institute of Technology

This paper describes how the curriculum and course format at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) has evolved based on our experience with the highly-successful Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). Using industry-standard hardware and software, AFIT graduate students designed, built, and operated a robust network infrastructure that survived scans, denial of service attacks, social engineering, viruses, and root kits orchestrated by a team of NSA-sponsored hackers. AFIT's two-quarter graduate-level course format changed this year to provide more hands-on, student-initiated education, which we found to be an effective teaching style for information security courses. This change in course format placed more emphasis on a coordinated team approach to defending the network. In this paper, we explain how the students formed teams and planned their activities and discuss how effective organization and division of labor can successfully thwart cyber attacks