Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
10.1145/3424954.3424959acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseiccConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

AIT Cyber Range: Flexible Cyber Security Environment for Exercises, Training and Research

Published: 12 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the evolution of threats and attacks and the speed of automation, new modern training and learning environments are needed to support the challenges of digital organizations and societies. In recent years, cyber ranges, i.e., virtual environments that support the simulation of diverse infrastructures, have emerged and are often utilized for cyber security exercises or training. With these environments, organizations or individuals can increase their preparedness and dexterity, for example, by training to identify and mitigate incidents and attacks. In this paper, we present the AIT Cyber Range which was designed based on several principles such as scalability, flexibility and the utilization of Open Source technologies. This paper outlines the building blocks of the architecture and implementation: computing platform, infrastructure provisioning, software provisioning and scenario engine. Furthermore, the implementation is demonstrated by three use cases: cyber exercises, training as well as security research and development. For future work, we aim to further extend the building blocks and to address federation and interoperability with other cyber ranges.

References

[1]
David Allison, Paul Smith, Kieran McLaughlin, Fan Zhang, Jamie Coble, and Rodney Busquim. 2020. PLC-based Cyber-Attack Detection: A Last Line of Defence. In IAEA International Conference on Nuclear Security: Sustaining and Strengthening Efforts. IAEA, 10. https://conferences.iaea.org/event/181/contributions/15513/
[2]
Agnė Brilingaitė, Linas Bukauskas, and Eduardas Kutka. 2017. Development of an Educational Platform for Cyber Defence Training. In European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Academic Conferences International Limited, 73--81.
[3]
Jon Davis and Shane Margath. 2013. A Survey of Cyber Ranges and Testbeds. Technical Report DSTO -GD -0771. Cyber Electronic Warfare Division, DSTO Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Edinburgh, South Australia 5111, Australia. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a594524.pdf
[4]
Tamara Denning, Adam Lerner, Adam Shostack, and Tadayoshi Kohno. 2013. Control-Alt-Hack: the design and evaluation of a card game for computer security awareness and education. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security (CCS '13). ACM, Berlin, Germany, 915--928.
[5]
ECSO. 2020. Understanding Cyber Ranges: From Hype to Reality. WG5 PAPER. European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO), Brussels, Belgium. 31 pages. https://www.ecs-org.eu/documents/uploads/understanding-cyber-ranges-from-hype-to-reality.pdf
[6]
ENISA. 2015. The 2015 Report on National and International Cyber Security Exercises. Technical Report 1.0. European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), Heraklion, Greece. 32 pages. https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/latest-report-on-national-and- international- cyber-security-exercises/at_download/fullReport
[7]
B. Ferguson, A. Tall, and D. Olsen. 2014. National Cyber Range Overview. In 2014 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). IEEE, Baltimore, MD, 123--128.
[8]
M. Frank, M. Leitner, and T. Pahi. 2017. Design Considerations for Cyber Security Testbeds: A Case Study on a Cyber Security Testbed for Education. In 2017 IEEE 3rd Intl Conf on Big Data Intelligence and Computing and Cyber Science and Technology Congress. IEEE, Orlando, FL, USA, 38--46. https://doi.org/10.1109/DASC-PICom-DataCom-CyberSciTec.2017.23
[9]
Sylvain Frey, Awais Rashid, Pauline Anthonysamy, Maria Pinto-Albuquerque, and Syed Asad Naqvi. 2019. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Study of Security Decisions in a Cyber-Physical Systems Game. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 45, 5 (May 2019), 521--536. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2017.2782813
[10]
J. Kim, Y. Maeng, and M. Jang. 2019. Becoming Invisible Hands of National Live-Fire Attack-Defense Cyber Exercise. In 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS PW). IEEE, Stockholm, Sweden, 77--84.
[11]
Stela Kucek and Maria Leitner. 2020. An Empirical Survey of Functions and Configurations of Open-Source Capture the Flag (CTF) Environments. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 151 (Feb. 2020), 102470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2019.102470
[12]
Stela Kucek and Maria Leitner. 2020. Training the Human-in-the-Loop in Industrial Cyber Ranges. In Digital Transformation in Semiconductor Manufacturing (Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering), Sophia Keil, Rainer Lasch, Fabian Lindner, and Jacob Lohmer (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 107--118. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48602-0_10
[13]
Maria Leitner, Timea Pahi, and Florian Skopik. 2017. Situational Awareness for Strategic Decision Making on a National Level. In Collaborative Cyber Threat Intelligence, Florian Skopik (Ed.). CRC Press, 225--276.
[14]
U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology. 2018. Cyber Ranges. Technical Report. NIST, US. https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2018/02/13/cyber_ranges.pdf
[15]
Cuong Pham, Dat Tang, Ken-ichi Chinen, and Razvan Beuran. 2016. CyRIS: a cyber range instantiation system for facilitating security training. In Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Information and Communication Technology (SoICT '16). ACM, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 251--258.
[16]
Florian Skopik, Giuseppe Settanni, Roman Fiedler, and Ivo Friedberg. 2014. Semi-synthetic data set generation for security software evaluation. In Proc. of the 12th Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust. IEEE, 156--163.
[17]
Ciza Thomas, Vishwas Sharma, and N Balakrishnan. 2008. Usefulness of DARPA dataset for intrusion detection system evaluation. In Data Mining, Intrusion Detection, Information Assurance, and Data Networks Security 2008, Vol. 6973. International Society for Optics and Photonics, SPIE, 164--171.
[18]
Giovanni Vigna, Kevin Borgolte, Jacopo Corbetta, Adam Doupé, Yanick Fratantonio, Luca Invernizzi, Dhilung Kirat, and Yan Shoshitaishvili. 2014. Ten Years of iCTF: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. In 2014 USENIX Summit on Gaming, Games, and Gamification in Security Education (3GSE 14). USENIX Association, San Diego, CA, 7.
[19]
Jan Vykopal, Martin Vizvary, Radek Oslejsek, Pavel Celeda, and Daniel Tovarnak. 2017. Lessons learned from complex hands-on defence exercises in a cyber range. In 2017 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE). IEEE Computer Society, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 1--8. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2017.8190713
[20]
Markus Wurzenberger, Florian Skopik, Giuseppe Settanni, and Wolfgang Scherrer. 2016. Complex log file synthesis for rapid sandbox-benchmarking of security-and computer network analysis tools. Information Systems 60 (2016), 13--33.
[21]
Muhammad Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt, and Vasileios Gkioulos. 2020. Cyber ranges and security testbeds: Scenarios, functions, tools and architecture. Computers & Security 88 (Jan. 2020), 101636. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2019.101636

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)A step-by-step definition of a reference architecture for cyber rangesJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10391788(103917)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2024)Effect of kettle bells and battle rope training on grip strength and body composition among university volleyball playersSalud, Ciencia y Tecnología - Serie de Conferencias10.56294/sctconf20249053(905)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
  • (2024)GoibhniUWE: A Lightweight and Modular Container-Based Cyber RangeJournal of Cybersecurity and Privacy10.3390/jcp40300294:3(615-628)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. AIT Cyber Range: Flexible Cyber Security Environment for Exercises, Training and Research

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      EICC '20: Proceedings of the 2020 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference
      November 2020
      72 pages
      ISBN:9781450375993
      DOI:10.1145/3424954
      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 12 January 2021

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. cyber exercises
      2. cyber range
      3. information security
      4. testbed
      5. training

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Funding Sources

      Conference

      EICC 2020

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)575
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)86
      Reflects downloads up to 24 Nov 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)A step-by-step definition of a reference architecture for cyber rangesJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10391788(103917)Online publication date: Feb-2025
      • (2024)Effect of kettle bells and battle rope training on grip strength and body composition among university volleyball playersSalud, Ciencia y Tecnología - Serie de Conferencias10.56294/sctconf20249053(905)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
      • (2024)GoibhniUWE: A Lightweight and Modular Container-Based Cyber RangeJournal of Cybersecurity and Privacy10.3390/jcp40300294:3(615-628)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2024
      • (2024)A Study on Designing Cyber Training and Cyber Range to Effectively Respond to Cyber ThreatsElectronics10.3390/electronics1319386713:19(3867)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2024
      • (2024)Towards Customized Cyber Exercises using a Process-based Lifecycle ModelProceedings of the 2024 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference10.1145/3655693.3655713(37-45)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2024
      • (2024)Navigating the landscape of security modelling: the MORS gridJournal of Cybersecurity10.1093/cybsec/tyae02410:1Online publication date: 14-Nov-2024
      • (2024)Towards NICE-by-Design Cybersecurity Learning Environments: A Cyber Range for SOC TeamsJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-024-09816-w32:2Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
      • (2023)Interactive Environment for Effective Cybersecurity Teaching and LearningProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3600160.3605007(1-9)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2023
      • (2023)Cyber ArenaProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569828(221-227)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
      • (2023)Train as you Fight: Evaluating Authentic Cybersecurity Training in Cyber RangesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581046(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Login options

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media