Security in Tele-Lab — Protecting an online virtual lab for security training

Abstract

The rapid burst of Internet usage and the corresponding growth of security risks and online attacks for the everyday user or the enterprise employee have emerged the terms Awareness Creation and Information Security Culture. Nevertheless, security education widely has remained an academic issue. Teaching system 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 within a remote virtual lab environment -over the web, accessible by everyone.Such a system is inherently exposed to various security threats, since it has to provide full access to virtual machines running attack tools for potentially malicious users. The paper at hand introduces usage, management and operation of Tele-Lab as well as its architecture. Furthermore, this work focuses on possible attacks, the challenges when securing such a system, and shows how to set up an infrastructure that ensures the main security objectives identified as authentication, authorisation and availability.

Online assessment for hands-on cyber security training in a virtual lab

“…Comparing to the approach presented by the authors of [7] and [8], Tele-Lab does neither need any additional virtual machines on the virtual network used for the student's hands-on session, nor does it need any shared resources (networking or shared folders) between the lab machines and the physical host. Since Tele-Lab requires the students to use tools for attacking that he could also use to attack the physical host or virtual machines assigned to other users, it is an important security constraint to isolate the virtual network for a certain experiment from all other (physical and virtual) resources [12]. When revising the VM lifecycle from Fig.…”

decade evolution of virtual and remote laboratories

“…The rising usage of the Internet this year also captivates the attention related to cybersecurity. A previous study reported that some teaching techniques are not suitable for security training because of the inadequate environment [4].…”

Exploring Cybersecurity Education and Training Techniques: A Comprehensive Review of Traditional, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality Approaches

“…Various problems are associated with conventional cybersecurity training methods (see Table 5). There is a short time to learn long materials, which affects knowledge retention [71]. Different types of learning models have been proposed to deal with these cybersecurity training problems, but there are still different problems associated with these training techniques [72].…”