Firewall Fighter

An interactive game where the player acts as a firewall to sort incoming traffic to a network.

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Inspiration

The idea of teaching kids about cybersecurity at an early age got us thinking about when we first learned about anything related to cybersecurity. Among our earliest memories included learning about firewalls, but the way we were taught about it was both uninteresting and inaccurate in hindsight. The teacher would simply put an inaccurate diagram on the board and inform us that it "blocked most of the traffic from our computers." We felt that this model did not properly represent the amount of parsing and work a firewall must perform, and there must be a better way to teach students about this concept.

What it does

The player controls a small ball on screen with a leap motion. Traffic (red and green cubes) enter the top of the screen and exit through the bottom. The player must direct their ball into the red malicious cubes to prevent them from entering our network while allowing as many green cubes as possible to pass through. Sounds were added so that hitting a cube feels more like a real world action. The game also gets progressively harder as the game goes on as more cubes fall in the same time period.

How we built it

We used the leap motion detect and translate hand motions into an in-game action of moving a sphere around. The sphere is simply mapped to the movements of the palm of the right hand. This sphere is then used as the "mouse" on screen for the user. We then used simple unity c# scripts and objects to create the cubes that fall down the screen, instructions, and a score.

Challenges we ran into

From the onset, we had a steep learning curve to learn C# and Unity which neither of us had used before. We managed to figure them both out pretty well, but we struggled to properly detect collisions between the hand object the leap automatically creates and other objects we create. In order to resolve this problem, we had to create a sphere that followed the hand around. Then, we could use this sphere to detect collisions with other objects. This made the coding much easier, but also made the controls easier too. The user does not have to see and try to comprehend a whole hand on the screen, they can simply just move one little ball around.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a working prototype of the game we envisioned in the beginning. We're also proud the game feels somewhat natural and fun to play.

What we learned

We taught ourselves how to use three new things (leap motion, Unity, c#).

What's next for Firewall Fighter

Our game could have a bit more explanation of the cyber-security principles.

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