DeterLab Support for Cyber Security Educators

DETER’s support for education includes the basic use of the DeterLab, and use of exercises within it, as well as development of new exercises and incorporation of changes to exercises. The most important support for education in DeterLab consists of the capabilities for re-using packaged experiments that comprise a lab exercise. In addition, the DETER team has developed several DeterLab features for supporting instructors in common teaching or class management tasks, so that the exercises are turnkey, usable without prior training of DeterLab usage.

  • Introduction to Linux and DeterLab
  • Buffer overflows
  • Pathname attacks
  • SQL injections
  • OS hardening
  • Permissions and firewalls
  • Computer forensics
  • Network intrusion detection
  • ARP spoofing
  • Man-in-the-middle attack
  • DNS man-in-the-middle attack
  • TCP SYN flood
  • Worm modeling
  • Worm detection
  • P2P botnet

Security Lab Exercises Available in DeterLab

Educators’ use of DeterLab shares the basic capabilities of research usage, with over 400 physical machines, configurable network elements, and a base of network emulation management capabilities. This hardware and software enables DeterLab users to construct test networks with a wide variety of topologies, and with nodes and virtual machines that run OS and application software of the user’s choice. Interaction with DeterLab occurs via a Web interface, with graphical tools for managing experiments conducted in a dedicated experimental network.
 
DeterLab further provides two modes of working on an exercise. An instructor may choose an individual mode, where each student’s work is protected from the others, or they may choose a group mode where students collaborate within a group and expose their work to each other. Simple, well-defined lab exercises are well-suited for individual work while more complex, research exercises often demand engagement by a group of students to complete within a semester.
 
Over 30 educational institutions in 6 countries have made educational use of DeterLab, some with a single course using a single exercise, some with several courses using many of the available exercises, or developing a new exercise. In Fall 2010 there were ten courses that used DeterLab, from a set of schools diverse in size, ranking, location, and course size, and number of exercises performed.