Sandboxing the Cyberspace for Cybersecurity Education and Learning

What is it about?

Containerization techniques and solutions provide less overhead and can be used instead of virtualization techniques to revise the existing approaches. Furthermore, it is important to sandbox or replicate existing systems or services for the cybersecurity exercises to be realistic. To address such challenges, we conducted a performance evaluation of some of the existing deployment techniques to analyse their benefits and drawbacks. We tested techniques relevant to containerization or MicroVMs that include less overhead instead of the regular virtualization techniques to provide meaningful and comparable results from the deployment of scalable solutions, demonstrating their benefits and drawbacks. Finally, we presented a use case for deploying cybersecurity exercises that requires less effort and moderate system resources and an approach for monitoring the progress of the participants using a host-based intrusion system.

Featured Image

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Virtualization technologies provide beneficial ways for hosting multiple machines within one single system, decreasing the required deployment effort and system resources, enhancing the instructor’s ability to deploy complex scenarios for education purposes. Our purpose is to create a flexible and portable solution without requiring any existing deployed infrastructure and to deploy multiple systems to conduct security testing that includes complex processes such as adversary emulation and incident response.

Perspectives