Conceptual Model of Online Pedagogical Information Security Laboratory: Toward an Ensemble Artifact

Distance education in information security has unique requirements in comparison to on-campus education. For instance, an online InfoSec lab is required to provide hands-on education to distance students while development and operation of a lab is a non-trivial problem. There is a need to understand the nature of the online InfoSec labs as ensemble artifacts, and just a black-box tool´s view is not enough. This article suggests a conceptual model to explain the ensemble view of the online InfoSec lab. In doing so, the paper makes two specific contributions: First, it conceptualizes the online Information Security (InfoSec) lab as an ensemble artifact so that we can unfold the black-box view of an InfoSec lab and understand the important building blocks (entities of the lab) and their interrelationships. Second, it suggests design principles to implement the conceptual model of an InfoSec lab.