A distributed virtual laboratory architecture for cybersecurity training

Abstract

The rapid burst of Internet usage and the corresponding growth of security risks and online attacks for the everyday user or enterprise employee lead to the concepts of Awareness Creation and Information Security Culture. Nevertheless, security education has remained an academic issue mainly. Teaching system security or network security on the basis of practical experience inherits a great challenge for the teaching environment, which is traditionally solved using a computer laboratory at a university campus. The Tele-Lab project offers a system for hands-on IT security training in a remote virtual lab environment – on the web, accessible by everyone. The Tele-Lab platform provides individual learning environments for each student, that may consist of up to three virtual machines per learning environment. Besides in explorative learning, where students use the laboratory whenever they like, the Tele-Lab is used in a blended learning approach: a lecturer introduces a security topic in class using e.g. Powerpoint slides. Subsequently, the students perform a supervised practical exercise in the virtual laboratory. A typically sized course with 15 students can in consequence request up to 45 virtual machines from the Tele-Lab server. The paper at hand briefly presents usage, management and operation of Tele-Lab as well as its architecture. Furthermore, this work introduces an architecture for clustering of the virtual lab on application level and the necessary prerequisites for the implementation. The paper also presents an existing distributed usage scenario.