Virtual mashine Labtainers for emulation network vulnerabilities

Abstract

The number of cybercrimes is constantly increasing and currently poses a significant threat to our society and economy. There is also a growing number of threats to our personal data, confidentiality, children, and the elderly due to financial fraud, which is why cybersecurity specialists are in high demand across all industries. In such circumstances, the question of the availability of cybersecurity specialists and their training methods. The number of disciplines related to cybersecurity is rapidly increasing in higher education institutions. The training of future cybersecurity specialists is a top priority for our national security, financial stability, and economic development. The article discusses the utilization of the Labtainers virtual environment for organizing lab sessions in cybersecurity disciplines. It explores ARP protocol vulnerabilities, principles, and mechanisms behind ARP-Spoofing attacks. The analysis delves into existing tools for executing such attacks. The article provides comparative equipment characteristics for setting up lab environments using physical hardware and virtual machines. It highlights the advantages of containerization for deploying test network environments based on Docker containers. For investigating the Labtainers environment in organizing lab sessions, a lab exercise on simulating ARP-Spoofing attacks and analyzing network traffic using the Wireshark network sniffer was chosen. Labtainers offer over 50 cybersecurity lab exercises and tools for creating custom ones. To perform these exercises on personal equipment, importing a virtual machine for VirtualBox hypervisor or installing Labtainers on a Linux OS is necessary. Subsequently, configurations for specific lab work can be set up and exercises executed according to instructions. Labtainers is designed for deploying configured Docker containers, allowing the creation of complex network topologies even on modest computers. It automates assessment, enables student performance evaluation, and facilitates lab work execution in an isolated environment. Students complete lab exercises entirely on their own computers, regardless of the Linux distribution and packages installed. Labtainers operates on a virtual machine with Docker or on any Linux distribution with Docker installed. Additionally, Labtainers’ lab exercises are available as cloud-based virtual machines, such as on Azure.