Security through play

The US Naval Postgraduate School and University of Washington each independently developed informal security-themed tabletop games. [d0x3d!] is a board game in which players collaborate as white-hat hackers, tasked to retrieve a set of valuable digital assets held by an adversarial network. Control-Alt-Hack is a card game in which three to six players act as white-hat hackers at a security consulting company. These games employ modest pedagogical objectives to expose broad audiences to computer security topics.

Play as Part of Security Education

Others have claimed success in encoding basic computer science principles in simple games¹, ² Likewise, we hypothesize games might be able to encode skills essential in reasoning about security. Eric Klopfer and his colleagues identified five freedoms essential to play: ³ ■

The freedom to experiment

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The freedom to fail

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The freedom to fashion identities

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The freedom of interpretation, and

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The freedom of autonomous effort.