Research on Developing an Attack and Defense Lab Environment for Cross Site Scripting Education in Higher Vocational Colleges

Cross site scripting attacks are the most common network attacks nowadays. In order to let the students in higher vocational colleges master the attack and defense skills of cross site scripting, it's essential to let them have the opportunity to truly practice the attacking behaviors as hackers do, and to practice the defense countermeasures as web site administrators do. In this paper, we have developed an attacking and defense lab environment for cross site scripting education in higher vocational colleges. Our experience shows that by using this lab environment, students can better understand what cross site scripting vulnerabilities are, why they occur, how to exploit them and how to fix them. We suggest that a lot more researches need to be done in the area of developing attacking and defense lab environments in order to improve the outcomes of network security education in higher vocational colleges.