Ethical hacking challenge platform wins government backing to prepare for launch into commercial market

Hacktivity Cyber Security Labs is a virtual lab environment – allowing computing students to remotely log into virtual machines (VMs) and receive randomly generated security or ethical hacking challenges, individualised to each user.

The platform features hands-on tasks, league tables, progress monitoring dashboards and instant feedback and challenges through a chatbot.

Dr Z. Cliffe Schreuders, Reader in Cyber Security and Director of the Cybercrime and Security Innovation Centre at Leeds Beckett, designed the Hacktivity platform. He explained: “Hacktivity is the product of nine years of academic research and development. Creating hacking challenges for our students helps them to put theory into practice. We want to make it fun and engaging to learn cyber security – so we have been developing a lot of our own software and techniques.”

The £32,000 funding boost was awarded as part of Innovate UK’s Cyber Academic Start-up Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP) – which aims to help universities to commercialise cyber security research.

During the first stage of the programme, the academic team will receive training to develop a value proposition, carry out market research, and investigate the pathways to commercialising the platform.

The team will then pitch for further stages of funding - to begin working with partner organisations and carry out further research and development.

Dr Schreuders said: “CyberASAP is a great opportunity to learn from experts how we can commercialise our state-of-the-art platform, grow its user-base outside of the university, and fund its continued growth - including further technical development and content creation.

“Hacktivity is a unique and useful resource and has had a great impact on our students. Our open source framework – SecGen - is already used by many internationally, and there is potential for so many more people to gain from what we have developed – from security professionals to other universities and employers.”

There are several unique features that Hacktivity provides in comparison to other existing platforms.

Paul Doney, Head of Subject for Computing at Leeds Beckett, explained: “Most hacking challenges involve manually setting up a challenge which you would use once - and each student would have the exact same challenge. Our software creates and automates that process and makes it interesting by randomising it – so that each student has a uniquely configured system and problem and a unique experience.

“We also have Hackerbot automated chatbots which present hacking and defensive challenges and carry out real attacks.”

Hacktivity has a large library of content. It has all been mapped to the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK) – the national Body of Knowledge informing and underpinning education and professional training for the cyber security sector. It challenges students’ skills on areas including systems security and defensive controls, web and network security, ethical hacking and penetration testing, malware analysis, software exploitation, and incident response and investigation.

One of the key elements of Hacktivity is its Capture the Flag games – and it has unique benefits for hosting events for this popular game across multiple universities or organisations. Capture the Flag competitions involve users working through security hacking and defensive challenges. Students are rewarded with ‘flags’ for completing tasks – a flag of text is revealed which the student can use to prove they have completed the challenge.

Dr Schreuders added: “We run regular Capture the Flag events on Hacktivity to give our students opportunities to engage, and explore security issues, beyond their course work.”

Last year, Leeds Beckett University’s BSc (Hons) and MSc Cyber Security degree courses received accreditation from the National Cyber Security Centre NCSC - the UK’s leading technical authority on cyber security. It is one of only nine universities in the UK to be awarded the accreditation for an undergraduate degree.