History logHistory-Log

Security professionals from partner companies tried the first version of the PenQuest Scenario Creator, a web tool for building your own community games. Public release is planned for 2026.

Funded by a KIRAS Innovation AKUT grant, we are reworking the interface and usability. The changes run on the alpha server for now, and we are looking for testers.

In quiz mode, your security knowledge decides how likely your actions are to succeed.

Sebastian spent a month at MIT's ALFA Lab refining the bot and the AI environment.

Nico Gentilini joined the team to build the scenario creation tool.

Paper presentation: PenQuestEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Cyber Security, with a preview of upcoming AI features.

Reworked exploits and credentials, and the bot is back.

The main paper on PenQuest's model and mechanics is out, open access: Gamifying information security.

PenQuest gets a version number for the first time. More features are on the way.

More realistic attacks, stability fixes and a new game manual.

We rebuilt the backend and middleware to prepare PenQuest for reinforcement learning and other AI work:

• a message queue based on RabbitMQ
• PostgreSQL for scenarios, actions and games
• the backend rewritten from Python to C#

Update May 2024: the overhaul is complete and most bugs are fixed.

We ran a remote PenQuest workshop at the UIIN Unlock conference for lecturers and educators in higher education. The conference focuses on digital escape rooms and gamification.

In 2022 we started the account @PenQuestGame to share news and patch notes. Update January 2025: we have ended our presence on X. News now appear here.

We had a PenQuest booth at the IT Security eXchange (ITsecX) in St. Pölten. Security professionals and students played the latest version and talked with the developers. We collected a lot of feedback and gained new players.

We invited the community to design SVG icons for actions and equipment. Good icons are rectangular, monochrome, drawn with thick lines and still readable at 25% size. Contributors are credited and get a unique avatar.

We presented PenQuest at the IKT Sicherheitskonferenz 2022 in Vienna, Austria's largest annual security conference, hosted by the Austrian Ministry of Defence. With more than 60 exhibitors and over 50 talks, it was our biggest audience so far.

Sebastian presented PenQuest to security-minded software developers at the sec4dev conference in Vienna. Attendees could drop by and play the current version at their own pace.

PenQuest debuted as a teaching tool in a full-day IT security workshop at Das Fokus N'Cyan in St. Jakob. Participants from several organisations, including the Red Cross, played through a ransomware scenario and worked out attack and defense strategies.

Simon Gmeiner, a data science student at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, joined the team. He works on the AI implementation, starting with a simple bot and moving on to reinforcement learning.

On 26 and 27 April we ran a PenQuest workshop at the LSZ Security and Risk Management Congress in Loipersdorf. Participants from various companies and institutions played the latest version, and we talked with many security experts.

Thomas, a senior front-end developer, joined to build new features and improve the code. Maximilian, a visual designer, joined to make the look and feel more appealing and easier to use.

At ITsecX in St. Pölten, under the motto Security Risk Economics: The Value of (Missing) Security, attendees played the PenQuest alpha. We received feedback and offers to collaborate.

We gave a seminar at the University of Luxembourg and discussed PenQuest with game theory experts there. Topics included future collaboration and applications to physical border security.

We presented PenQuest in the think tank webinar series of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG). The session led to a lively discussion and new testers.

The ALFA group at MIT CSAIL, which works on machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and data science, took an interest in the model behind PenQuest and offered to join future alpha tests.