ISEDJ

Abstract: Professors teaching cyber security classes often face challenges when developing workshops for their students: How does one quickly and efficiently configure and deploy an operating system for a temporary learning/testing environment? Faculty teaching these classes spend countless hours installing, configuring and deploying multiple system configurations only to decommission the operating system after needed usage is complete. This paper presents a system that was developed to significantly reduce testing environment setup times by establishing a virtual networking lab (ViNeL) that allowed a cyber defense club at a public regional university to spin up an entire network of virtual machines to simulate business environments and prepare for competitions. The application also allowed club members to launch a single operating system for lab style experimentation. The application uses the remote desktop protocol (RDP) to make it platform independent. Built using Oracle VirtualBox on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), the virtual networking lab is completely open source and can be implemented on a variety of server hardware configurations. Details on the development and implementation are presented to aid in the development of similar systems in different environments.

Keywords: Cyber Security, Virtual Environments, Curriculum, Building Systems

Download this article: ISEDJ - V16 N1 Page 61.pdf

Recommended Citation: Reinicke, B., Baker, E., Toothman, C. (2018). ViNEL: A Virtual Networking Lab for Cyber Defense Education. Information Systems Education Journal, 16(1) pp 61-73. http://isedj.org/2018-16/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of EDSIG 2017)