Clustering hybrid cyber ranges for cybersecurity education purposes

Details

Supervisors

Legay, Axel ; Duhoux, Benoît

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This Master's thesis objective is to develop a cyber range infrastructure based on a cluster of small computers, in a way that would allow us to answer the following question: "How to build a cyber range infrastructure to run training scenarios while preserving low cost and low energy consumption?" It will also be important to assess this cyber range implementation based on its functionality, costs, and suitability for cybersecurity education. The main contributions of this Master's thesis consist on the development of a new framework to deploy "hybrid cyber ranges". The hybrid characteristics of our cyber range implementation allow us to deploy ARM-based workload as well as x86-64 based workload, and allows us to easily deploy both VM and containers depending of our needs. It allows the development of new scenarios, while maintaining compatibility with general scripts allowing both ease of use, reusability of components and modularity. The physical implementation of this cyber range was built over a cluster of Intel NUC and raspberry Pi and have an initial cost of less than 700 euros to replicate. During our test, The maximum power used by our cyber range was 35 watts during our stress test, for a general consumption around 20 watts. All in one, our cyber range seems to be an affordable solution for educative institutions.