Cyber Range as a tool for cyber security education
Let's face the truth. To ensure cybersecurity, we need procedures and tools that allow us to educate our professionals effectively. Though not a universal solution, the Cyber Range provides possibilities for realization ranging from the simplest training for several students to international cybersecurity exercise for hundreds of participants.
Different approaches are used to realize these activities, such as the simple connection of hardware elements, simple virtualization, and sophisticated cloud solutions. The KYPO Cyber Range Platform (CRP) team uses the Open Stack virtual environment. The advantage of this approach is scalability and easy preparation of trainings. KYPO CRP, as one of the few platforms, uses open source technologies to create, modify, and automatically deploy network topologies. A graphical user interface for network topology management, training creation, data export for later analysis, student management, launching and management of individual training sessions is also available.
KYPO CRP supports two types of educational use cases. The first one is training, which is provided mainly at university students and professionals from commercial organizations. The second one is cyber defense exercise, which has been carried out since 2015 in cooperation with NÚKIB under the name Cyber Czech.
Properly designed trainings are an ideal way of education in cybersecurity. Students work exclusively in a virtual environment, solve assigned tasks, and become familiar with real attacks on their training infrastructures. Trainings can also be chained together to create complete training programs.
Complex Cyber Defense Exercises (CDX) are useful for turning knowledge into practice, communicating, team coordination, and working under pressure. The exercise also allows you to link the technical skill and the management skill of cybersecurity and create a comprehensive learning activity.
If you want to know something about cyber ranges, cyber defence exercises, or trainings, Jakub Čegan is your guy.
Jakub Čegan has been working for five years as manager of the KYPO Cyber Range Platform. After the platform decided to make it an open-source, he became a cybersecurity business development manager to prove that Masaryk University could also provide amazing and competitive solutions for the industry.
In the last years, Jakub has been leading the Cyber Czech exercises for MUNI as well as executing trainings for our industry partners. So basically, creating trainings is his passion. He is the person in charge of all related topics about cyber ranges, from trainings and training methodologies to cyber range taxonomies and scoring methodologies.