A Case Study in Helping Students to Covertly Eat Their Classmates

Werewolves is an online version of the game Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow that we developed in 2012 to help teach information flow in a computer security and privacy class. The game pits werewolves against townspeople in a shared Linux system, where students must use the command line environment to find information flow leaks in the form of side channels that reveal the werewolves’ identities.

Werewolves has many desirable traits, such as the ability to make learning about information flow fun and the fact that the kinds of attacks students can carry out to gain an advantage in the game are open ended, which leads to self-guided learning. However, these benefits quickly deteriorate if one or two students dominate the game. In this paper, we discuss instances where this has occurred through several uses of the game, and propose ways to ameliorate this problem.