Improving software security awareness using a serious game

摘要

Protecting people from cyber threats imposes great challenges, not only technically, but also socially. To achieve the intended level of awareness, software security principles need to be shown with concrete examples during security education. This study aims to design a serious game integrating software security knowledge and concepts into the processes to make it more engaging to learn while playing. In this paper, we have: (i) designed a serious game to compensate the deficiencies in the literature; (ii) performed empirical evaluations including survey, brainstorming and observation to the proposed game. Results: Our study shows that: (i) Cyber Security-Requirements Awareness Game (CSRAG) has a positive effect on players security learning outcomes, level of engagement and participation; (ii) Game-based learning can be an effective way of teaching security related scenarios.