The DETER Project offers hands-on security education to a wide range of colleges and universities. Teaching cyber security is a core component of DETER's twofold mission of developing research into new methods and technology for cyber-security research, and of operating DeterLab, the shared facility for cyber-security experimentation, testing, and education. The DETER Project enables of security educators to include the use of DeterLab in their course curriculum, giving their students realistic experience in cyber security.
A Shared Learning Facility
As a learning facility, DeterLab fills a significant gap in security instruction, providing educators worldwide with facilities and materials for security lab exercises that complement existing courses delivered in a classroom setting. Instructors and students conduct these lab exercises using DeterLab's dedicated hardware and networks via remote access to DeterLab's Web-based user interface. These practical exercises provide students with an ultimate active learning experience, enabling them to see and feel the phenomena taught in the classroom.
A key feature for educators is the reusable nature of lab exercises that have been developed by the DETER Project team and collaborators. These exercises are developed specifically for educators and intended for classroom use via immediate access to the exercise materials employing DeterLab. Teachers and students can use DeterLab’s education features without having to be experts in DeterLab's advanced research capabilities.
Educational use of DeterLab begins when an instructor gets started by creating an educational project in DeterLab, and then assign exercises to their students. Students are then able to conduct each exercise as an experiment in the lab. As students run their experiments, all network communication is isolated from the Internet, enabling their exercises to engage malicious code and perform the same destructive actions that occur in real-world cyber attacks — without posing any threat to other DeterLab users or to the Internet at large.
Education in DeterLab: How it Works
| Institution | Students | Exercises |
|---|---|---|
| USC | 100 | 5 |
| UCLA | 50 | 5 |
| Youngstown State Univ. | 50 | 1 |
| San Jose State Univ. | 45 | 3 |
| Santa Monica College | 45 | 4 |
| Colorado State Univ. | 40 | 6 |
| University of Portland | 30 | 3 |
| Vanderbilt Univ. | 15 | 2 |
| John Hopkins Univ. | 13 | 1 |
| Stevens Inst. of Tech. | 10 | 14 |
Classes Using DeterLab in Fall 2010
A variety of exercises, available via the education portal, cover a wide range of topics including the following: buffer overflows, code injection, and command-injection attacks, middle-in-the-middle attacks, worm modeling and detection, botnets, and DoS and DDoS attacks. Each of these exercises is a packaged experiment that demonstrates one of these topics, providing students with direct observation of attacks and interaction with targets. Students create and manipulate an instance of an experiment using an intuitive, Web-based interface to request, reconfigure, or release lab resources to either run an experiment "out-of-the-box" or with the student's variations in network topology or computing elements.
Over thirty educational institutions in six countries have benefitted from educational use of DeterLab. The more popular exercises have been used as the basis for student experiments by hundreds of students: some with a single course using a single exercise; others with several courses employing many of the available exercises or developing a new exercise altogether.
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