Automated Generation of Cybersecurity Exercise Scenarios

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Automated Generation of Cybersecurity Exercise Scenarios Charilaos Skandylas, Mikael Asplund There is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals with practical knowledge and experience to meet societal needs and comply with new standards and regulations. At the same time, the advances in software technology and artificial intelligence point towards a future where software agents will play an important role in protecting the computer systems that are critical for society to function. The training and development of both humans and software agents requires the design and execution of cybersecurity exercises that differ in properties such as size, scope, objectives, difficultly, etc. Cybersecurity scenarios are critical for the operation of cybersecurity exercises as they describe the scope, context, operational environment and storyline of each exercise. In this work, we present an approach to automatically generate cybersecurity scenarios that model enterprise IT systems. Our approach is able to generate a large number of scenarios that differ in multiple criteria including size, scope, difficulty, complexity and diversity. We further release as open source: a simulation and a virtualization environment that can run cybersecurity exercises based on the generated scenarios and a dataset containing 100000 sample scenarios. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2604.01079 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.01079v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01079 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Charilaos Skandylas [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 16:11:00 UTC (236 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)