Design and Implementation of MeetingMayhem: A Web-Based Cybersecurity Educational Game

Abstract

MeetingMayhem is a new web-based educational game that helps users learnadversarial thinking in communication networks. Players arrange a meeting time and place by sending and receiving messages through an insecure network under the control of a malicious adversary. The players develop greater awareness, understanding, and appreciation of adversarial thinking through playing the game. The goal is to create awareness about cybersecurity to audiences beyond computer science. To make the game widely available, we discuss our ideas to provide a system that is scalable, available to a wider audience, and development that is extensible to future versions of the game. During the early stages of implementation, having a robust system design (considering all use cases) and a modular, flexible object design, is crucial for faster development. We compare a monolithic client-server architecture with serverless architecture using AWS Lambda and perform experiments to compare the scalability, performance, number of lines of code, and ease of implementation of the project.