AISECKG (AISecKG: Knowledge Graph Dataset for Cybersecurity Education)

Cybersecurity education is exceptionally challenging as it involves learning the complex attacks; tools and developing critical problem-solving skills to defend the systems. For a student or novice researcher in the cybersecurity domain, there is a need to design an adaptive learning strategy that can break complex tasks and concepts into simple representations. An AI-enabled automated cybersecurity education system can improve cognitive engagement and active learning. Knowledge graphs (KG) provide a visual representation in a graph that can reason and interpret from the underlying data, making them suitable for use in education and interactive learning. However, there are no publicly available datasets for the cybersecurity education domain to build such systems. The data is present as unstructured educational course material, Wiki pages, capture the flag (CTF) writeups, etc. Creating knowledge graphs from unstructured text is challenging without an ontology or annotated dataset. However, data annotation for cybersecurity needs domain experts. To address these gaps, we made three contributions in this paper. First, we propose an ontology for the cybersecurity education domain for students and novice learners. Second, we develop AISecKG, a triple dataset with cybersecurity-related entities and relations as defined by the ontology. This dataset can be used to construct knowledge graphs to teach cybersecurity and promote cognitive learning. It can also be used to build downstream applications like recommendation systems or self-learning question-answering systems for students. The dataset would also help identify malicious named entities and their probable impact. Third, using this dataset, we show a downstream application to extract custom-named entities from texts and educational material on cybersecurity.