Organized cyber defense competitions

The Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX), an annual competition between students at the five U.S. Service Academies has developed into an extraordinary educational experience for the participants. During the exercise students will design and implement a realistic network against a set of realistic requirements. The students will then defend the networks they constructed over a 4 day period against attacks. Work has been conducted recently to examine how to best generalize the exercise methodology, as conducted at the Military Academies, to other universities. This paper describes the effort involve in executing a Cyber Defense Exercise, introducing the various functional groups, student team construction, and considerations when using the exercise methodology in other locations. We also describe the experienced and additional potential benefits of the exercise.