A Cybersecurity Game to Probe Human-AI Teaming

Recent advances in AI indicate that the future of cybersecurity workforce development lies in professionals working in Human-AI teams to defend online resources from opposing Human-AI teams of malicious attackers. However, there is little research on how human biases and attitudes affects the performance of human-AI teams in cybersecurity. To help explore this new research area, we describe a simulation game that helps students (future professionals) understand the concept of firewalls while enabling us to probe attitudes towards cybersecurity and AI, as well as trust and cooperation in HumanAI teams. Early study prototyping results indicate that students prefer an AI-teammate over a human in this simulation game setting. In addition, students seem to engage well with the game play, pointing towards this research platform’s suitability for exploring trust and cooperation in human-AI teams for game-based cybersecurity training, and to support our prior results on differing perspectives on cybersecrity risk.