In recent years, there has been a growing demand for cybersecurity experts, and, according to predictions, this demand will continue to increase. Cyber Ranges can fill this gap by combining hands-on experience with educational courses, and conducting cybersecurity competitions. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey of ten Cyber Ranges that were developed in the last decade, with a structured interview. The purpose of the interview is to find details about essential components, and especially the tools used to design, create, implement and operate a Cyber Range platform, and to present the findings.

Cyber Ranges and TestBeds for Education, Training, and Research

Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to a common interface for associating an ordered set of instructions and/or resources from a release automation application with a configuration manager node associated with a server type. Embodiments are directed to identifying an application, identifying a deployment environment for deploying the application, identifying a configuration manager, identifying a server type from a plurality of server types available for the application, identifying a configuration management node associated with the server type, defining an ordered set of instructions and/or resources for the configuration management node by selecting an instruction or resource from a list of instructions and recipes associated with the configuration management node, and storing the ordered set of instruction and/or resources for future deployment of the application in the configuration management node.

Dynamic release baselines in a continuous delivery environment

Linux is one of the operating systems to support the increasingly rapid development of internet technology. Apart from the speed of the process, security also needs to be considered. Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark is an example of a security standard. This study implements the CIS Benchmark using the Chef Inspec application. This research focuses on building a tool to perform security audits on the Ubuntu 20.04 operating system. 232 controls on CIS Benchmark were successfully implemented using Chef Inspec application. The results of this study were 87 controls succeeded, 118 controls failed, and 27 controls were skipped. This research is expected to be a reference for information system managers in managing system security.

Auditing Linux Operating System with Center for Internet Security (CIS) Standard

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new protocols and systems. This paper proposes an IaC (Infrastructure as Code) based tool called LiON (Lightweight On-demand Networking) for constructing virtual networks on the Internet for various experiments. For virtual nodes, various types of virtualization technologies such as network namespace, container, and virtual machine are supported. VXLAN is employed for virtual links between virtual nodes. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is adopted as the configuration file format, which enables the experimenter to intuitively design virtual network topologies. Layer-3 protocol agnostic experimental networks can be constructed, which enable to examine non-IP protocol stacks. LiON is implemented in Python and shell script. The time for constructing a virtual network slightly increases as the number of virtual nodes increases. TCP throughput of a virtual link is approximately 97 % of that of a physical link.

LiON: A L3 Protocol Agnostic Experimental Network Construction Tool Based on Infrastructure as Code

Cloud-based services and applications have been widely deployable these days. Such services benefit from the almost infinite cloud compute, storage, and networking resources. Many of such services are partially hosted on the cloud. That is, some of their tasks get executed off the cloud, and the other tasks are executed on the cloud. In this paper, we show how to automate the execution of these tasks for such services and applications. We use a reCAPTCHA service as a case study to automate the execution workflow of its various tasks that are deployed on both on-cloud and off-cloud environments. We present a system design and implementation for the workflow automation for this partially hosted cloud service. The implementation is carried out using the open source automation tool Chef.

Workflow Automation for Partially Hosted Cloud Services

The legacy automatic deployments of OpenStack are mostly focused on specific packets and configurations. This paper investigates the possibility to automate the deployment of both OpenStack and the underlying architecture at once (minimum one Controller Node and one Compute Node). The Chef tool proved to be a good candidate, together with Vagrant (for automatic creation and configuration of virtual environments) and VirtualBox (as hypervisor). Comparing to the manual installation, the time needed to have a fully functional solution decreased from more than 30 minutes/node (or hours for unexperienced or unlucky system admins) to 10 minutes/node (or even just 2 minutes/node if the Vagrant box has been executed before). As a major drawback, Chef does not know how to handle prompts from installed packages which imposed developing a workaround.

Cosmin Filip

Papers

Automation of the infrastructure and services for an openstack deployment using chef tool