A smartphone app for enhancing students' hands-on learning on network and DoS attacks traffic generation

Recently, smartphones have been growing increasingly in popularity within the student community. Hence, novel educational activities and tools, as well as learning approaches can be developed to get benefit from the prevalence of smartphones (e.g. mobility and closeness to students' daily lives). This paper discusses an Android mobile app, called Packets Generator, that aims at taking advantages of the benefits of smartphones and the best practices in learning information security, as well as promoting students' interests and increasing their self-efficacy. Packets Generator app allows students to further enhance their hands-on skills on network traffic and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks generation, using their smartphones, by practicing inside as well as outside the traditional desktop based laboratories, in the real-world environment; i.e., anywhere and anytime, at the students' convenience. Packets Generator app is freely available at Google Play Store. Based on statistics from Google Play Store, in about two years, the app turned popular with more than 50,000 downloads worldwide and around 3.73/5.0 users' rating. The impact of the app on the students' performance in terms of achieving the course outcomes is discussed.