ABSTRACT
With the rapid proliferation of Internet of things (IoT) devices across various sectors, ensuring robust cybersecurity practices has become paramount. The complexity and diversity of IoT ecosystems pose unique security challenges that traditional educational approaches often fail to address comprehensively. Current curricula may provide theoretical knowledge but typically lack the practical components necessary for students to engage with real-world cybersecurity scenarios. This gap hinders the development of proficient cybersecurity professionals capable of securing complex IoT infrastructures. To bridge this educational divide, a remote online laboratory was developed, allowing students to gain hands-on experience in identifying and mitigating cybersecurity threats in an IoT context. This virtual environment simulates real IoT ecosystems, enabling students to interact with actual devices and protocols while practicing various security techniques. The laboratory is designed to be accessible, scalable, and versatile, offering a range of modules from basic protocol analysis to advanced threat management. The implementation of this remote laboratory demonstrated significant benefits, equipping students with the necessary skills to confront and resolve IoT security issues effectively. Our results show an improvement in practical cybersecurity abilities among students, highlighting the laboratory's efficacy in enhancing IoT security education.
ABSTRACT
Internet of Things (IoT) learning involves the acquisition of transversal skills ranging from the development based on IoT devices and sensors (edge computing) to the connection of the devices themselves to management environments that allow the storage and processing (cloud computing) of data generated by sensors. The usual development cycle for IoT applications consists of the following three stages: stage 1 corresponds to the description of the devices and basic interaction with sensors. In stage 2, data acquired by the devices/sensors are employed by communication models from the origin edge to the management middleware in the cloud. Finally, stage 3 focuses on processing and presentation models. These models present the most relevant indicators for IoT devices and sensors. Students must acquire all the necessary skills and abilities to understand and develop these types of applications, so lecturers need an infrastructure to enable the learning of development of full IoT applications. A Web of Things (WoT) platform named Labs of Things at UNED (LoT@UNED) has been used for this goal. This paper shows the fundamentals and features of this infrastructure, and how the different phases of the full development cycle of solutions in IoT environments are implemented using LoT@UNED. The proposed system has been tested in several computer science subjects. Students can perform remote experimentation with a collaborative WoT learning environment in the cloud, including the possibility to analyze the generated data by IoT sensors.
ABSTRACT
Our society is nowadays evolving towards a digital era, due to the extensive use of computer technologies and their interconnection mechanisms, i.e., social networks, Internet resources, IoT services, etc. This way, new threats and vulnerabilities appear. Therefore, there is an urgent necessity of training students in the topic of cybersecurity, in which practical skills have to be acquired. In distance education, the inclusion of on-line resources for hands-on activities in its curricula is a key step in meeting that need. This work presents several contributions. First, the fundamentals of a virtual remote laboratory hosted in the cloud are detailed. This laboratory is a step forward since the laboratory combines both virtualization and cloud paradigms to dynamically create emulated environments. Second, this laboratory has also been integrated into the practical curricula of a cybersecurity subject, as an additional on-line resource. Third, the students' traceability, in terms of their interactions with the laboratory, is also analyzed. Psychological TAM/UTAUT factors (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access) that may affect the intention of using the laboratory are analyzed. Fourth, the degree of satisfaction is analyzed with a great impact, since the mean values of these factors are most of them higher than 4 points out of 5. In addition to this, the students' acceptance of the presented technology is exhaustively studied. Two structural equation models have been hypothesized and validated. Finally, the acceptance of the technology can be concluded as very good in order to be used in @? other Engineering contexts. In this sense, the calculated statistical values for the improved proposed model are within the expected ranges of reliability (X2 = 0.6, X2/DF = 0.3, GFI = 0.985, CIF = 0.985, RMSEA = 0) by considering the literature.
