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.

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Closed Rack Open Rack

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.
Student Workstations Printer

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.