Cybersecurity and Networking Research Laboratory
This laboratory is located in Sci III 314. Its purpose is to research network
security topics in an isolated network environment. Using virtualization, this
network will allow modeling of networks containing several hundred hosts.
This will enable a variety of research and educational activities, from
"Capture the Flag" and "Red Team, Blue Team" contests for the students to
modeling an attack as it moves through a network to developing tools to monitor
and prevent attacks.
Click any image for a larger view.
This is the heart of the laboratory, the isolated network rack. It is located
in the "secured" section of the room, behind the security cage, along with the
wiring rack for the entire third floor (not pictured). The rack contains the
servers needed to support the virtualization environment. The rack contains
the following equipment:
- UPS units and battery packs - This provides power conditioning and backup
power in case of an outage. The bottom two UPS units are redundant supplies,
each connected to a different 208v circuit. The top UPS unit is a 120v unit
used for components that cannot take 208v input.
- Management Server - This is a Windows Server 2008 1U server which is used
to run the Windows-specific management tools such as VMware Client and
Dell diagnostic tools.
- Console - This is a 1U monitor, keyboard and mouse unit which connects to
the KVM and allows one to access each server.
- VMware vSphere Server and Disk Array - This is the workhorse of the rack.
The server contains four 12 core CPUs (48 cores total), 256GB of RAM, an
internal RAID array for VMware vSphere 4 and an internal RAID array of
approximately half a terabyte for student/course related virtual machines.
The disk array contains two additional 1.2TB RAID arrays, which are used
for research related virtual machines. That is a total of nearly 3TB of
disk space for virtual machines.
- DNS, DHCP, NTP, Backup, Print Server - This is an older dual 2 core (4
cores total) server that is running Debian Linux. It manages all the
necessary network-related daemons needed for an isolated network. It also
manages backup services for the other servers.
- Tape Library - This is a DLT tape library for backups of the isolated
network servers. Since none of the machines in this lab can access the
department backup solution (or anything else on the Internet), a backup
solution has to be provided in the rack.
The lab contains seven student workstations that are connected to the isolated
network. Each student workstation runs Mint Linux with VMware Workstation and
security related virtual machines. Students will be able to log in to the
VMware vSphere server on the rack and create their own virtual machines.
Since the laboratory is not connected to the Internet, a printer is also provided in the room.