CyATP: Cybersecurity Awareness Training Platform

CyATP is a web platform for cybersecurity awareness training that makes use of Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques to automatically generate the training content; the serious game approach is employed for learning purposes. Using this platform, learners can increase their security awareness knowledge and put it to use in their daily life. The included training content is comprised of about 2500 computer security concepts and definitions, 278 quiz questions and 10 crossword puzzles. CyATP is being developed by the Cyber Range Organization and Design (CROND) NEC-endowed chair at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in Ishikawa, Japan.

An overview of the CyATP architecture is provided in the figure below. Trainees use the web interface to access the Concept Map and Learn Concepts pages in order to find out about the security concepts they want to study. They can also use the Take Quiz and Crossword Puzzle pages to test and deepen their knowledge. The front end of the CyATP platform is developed using Bootstrap and jQuery, and the back end employs Flask and Neo4j.

CyATP already includes some pregenerated awareness training content. To learn more about this content, and about how to add new training content to the database, see the Training Content Guide.

Prerequisites

As we store some components of the training content into a Neo4j graph database, the following step must be carried out before using CyATP:

• Install the Neo4j database platform. You can download the Neo4j Community Edition free of charge; we recommend Neo4j v4.0+. (Note that all versions of Neo4j require Java to be preinstalled.)

The following optional step can also be performed:

• Create a virtual Python environment. You can create an isolated Python environment and install packages into this virtual environment to avoid conflicts. This can be done using the options venv for Python 3 or virtualenv for Python 2. For example, you can run the following commands to create and activate the cyatp-env virtual environment:

  $ python3 -m venv cyatp-env
  $ source cyatp-env/bin/activate
  

Setup

To set up CyATP, follow the steps below:

1. Install the latest version of CyATP. Use the releases page to download the source code archive of the latest version of the training platform and extract it on your computer.

2. Install the required Python libraries. Go to the directory where CyATP is located and install the required third-party libriaries by running the following command:

   $ sudo -H pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Set up the Neo4j database. Follow the next steps in a terminal window to install the CyATP training database content into Neo4j:

   1. Enter the directory where Neo4j was installed (e.g., ~/neo4j-community-4.1.1/).
   2. Stop the Neo4j database service:

      $ ./bin/neo4j stop
      

   3. Copy the file neo_db/cyatp.db from the CyATP directory to the bin/ directory in the Neo4j installation:

      $ cp <CYATP_PATH>/neo_db/cyatp.db <NEO4J_PATH>/bin
      

   4. Load the CyATP training database into Neo4j:

      $ neo4j-admin load --from=cyatp.db --database=neo4j --force
      

   5. Restart the Neo4j database service:

      $ ./bin/neo4j restart
      

Notes

• After installing Neo4j, when you access http://localhost:7474 for the first time you will be asked to change the default database password. After you do that, make sure to also change the password included in file neo_db/config.py in the CyATP directory.

• After setting up the Neo4j database with CyATP training data, you can access http://localhost:7474 and run the following command to retrieve the existing data (the Cypher query language is used):

  MATCH (n) RETURN n
  

Quick Start

In order to start the CyATP web server, use a terminal window to go to the project directory and execute the following command:

$ env FLASK_APP=cyatp.py flask run

By default the web interface of CyATP can be accessed only locally at http://127.0.0.1:5000/. The screenshot below displays the top page, which provides an overview of CyATP and the functions of each additional page.

Configuration

• If you want to change the default port used by CyATP (which is 5000), use the option -p when running the program:

  $ env FLASK_APP=cyatp.py flask run -p <port_number>
  

• To make the CyATP server publicly available, use the option --host=0.0.0.0 when running the program:

  $ env FLASK_APP=cyatp.py flask run --host=0.0.0.0
  

• For more details about setting up Flask applications, see this tutorial. CyATP can also be deployed via a cloud service, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Alibaba Cloud. For details, see the documentation on Flask application deployment.

References

For a research background regarding CyATP, please refer to the following document:

• Y. Zeng, "Content Generation and Serious Game Implementation for Security Awareness Training", Master's thesis, March 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/10119/17105

For a list of contributors to this project, check the file CONTRIBUTORS included with the source code.