Enabling exercises, education and research with a comprehensive cyber range

Leitner, Maria and Frank, Maximilian and Langner, Gregor and Landauer, Max and Skopik, Florian and Smith, Paul and Akhras, Benjamin and Hotwagner, Wolfgang and Kucek, Stela and Pahi, Timea and Reuter, Lenhard and Warum, Manuel (2021) Enabling exercises, education and research with a comprehensive cyber range. Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications, 12 (4): 4. pp. 37-61. ISSN 2093-5374

Abstract

With the continuous rise of threat actors and attacks, it is even more imminent to create cyber ranges, for example as training and exercise environment, that contribute to the modern challenges of a digital society. New digital environments are needed to tackle information security and cyber security challenges. In the past 15 years, virtual environments that simulate a diverse set of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) infrastructures, further called cyber ranges, have been developed. These virtual platforms provide the operations of exercises, training, research and other activities. The sum of these activities contribute to science and strengthen the practice of organizations. In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of the AIT Cyber Range and outline its building blocks: computing platform, infrastructure provisioning, software provisioning and scenario engine. Furthermore, we describe five use cases: cyber exercises, training as well as security research and development on industrial control systems and intrusion detection systems. For future work, we aim to address federation and interoperability with other cyber ranges.