Powering Hands-on Cybersecurity Practices with Cloud Computing

Cybersecurity education and training have gained increasing attention in all sectors due to the prevalence and quick evolution of cyberattacks. A variety of platforms and systems have been proposed and developed to accommodate the growing needs of hands-on cybersecurity practice. However, those systems are either lacking sufficient flexibility (e.g., tied to a specific virtual computing service provider, little customization support) or difficult to scale. In this work, we present a cloud-based platform named EZSetup for hands-on cybersecurity practice at scale and our experience of using it in class. EZSetup is customizable and cloud-agnostic. Users can create labs through an intuitive Web interface and deploy them onto one or multiple clouds. We have used NSF funded Chameleon cloud and our private OpenStack cloud to develop, test and deploy EZSetup. We have developed 14 network and security labs using the tool and included six labs in an undergraduate network security course in spring 2019. Our survey results show that students have very positive feedback on using EZSetup and computing clouds for hands-on cybersecurity practice.