Sandboxing the Cyberspace for Cybersecurity Education and Learning

Abstract

Deploying the appropriate digital environment for conducting cybersecurity exercises can be challenging and typically requires a lot of effort and system resources. Usually, for deploying vulnerable webservices and setting up labs for hands-on cybersecurity exercises to take place, more configuration is required along with technical expertise. 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 analyze 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. Towards this direction, we present a use case for deploying cybersecurity exercises that requires less effort and moderate system resources. By using the deployed components, we provide a baseline proposal for monitoring the progress of the participants using a host-based intrusion system.