CCN Webinar on Cyber Ranges – European Cyber Competence Network

Date

Thursday, 25 June 2020

13:00 – 15:00 CET

The purpose of cyber ranges is to improve the training of cybersecurity professionals’ and students’ learning by introducing hands-on experience. Can you tell what does it mean to develop or run one of these cyber ranges? Do you know how many challenges you have to overcome? We will show you some of them during this webinar.

Our webinar presents the achievements of the four European Cyber Competence Networks pilots — CONCORDIA, CyberSec4Europe, ECHO, and SPARTA. Each of these pilots have a different approach to the topic. Thanks to that, we have a complex perspective on the cyber ranges. Join us and take this webinar as an opportunity to see and discuss cyber ranges on a slightly more technical level.

Agenda

Time (CET Prague time)	Topic	Speaker
13:00 – 13:05	Welcome	Jakub Čegan, CONCORDIA
13:05 – 13:20	European Commission perspective on Cyber Ranges	Rafael Tesoro Carretero, EC
13:20 – 13:45	KYPO Cyber Range Platform	Daniel Tovarňák, CONCORDIA
13:45– 14:10	Cyber Sandbox Creator	Jan Vykopal, CyberSec4Europe
14:10 – 14:35	Marketplace and Federation for Cyber Ranges	Luc Dandurand, ECHO
14:35 – 15:00	How we end up with a Cyber Range	Tomáš Lieskovan, SPARTA
15:00– 15:10	Q&A

Topics and Panelists

KYPO Cyber Range Platform

We will present our KYPO Cyber Range Platform, a fully-fledged cyber-range platform developed on top of an Open Stack cloud environment. KYPO CRP uses Ansible roles and our custom YAML description format for building network topologies. The same approach was adopted by a lightweight Cyber Sandbox Creator tool.

Possibilities of KYPO CRP will be demonstrated on an example of a training instance lifecycle, the similar instance we are using for teaching students and training cybersecurity professionals at MUNI.

Daniel Tovarňák (CONCORDIA)

Daniel is a researcher at CSIRT-MU — a cybersecurity team of Masaryk University, Brno — where he deals with architectures of complex cybersecurity systems. At the present time, he serves as a technical lead and architect of the KYPO Cyber Range Platform. Research-wise, Daniel focuses on applications of event-driven architectures and data science methods in cybersecurity. He specializes in the acquisition, processing, and stream-based analysis of cybersecurity data, with a special focus on log data.

Cyber Sandbox Creator

We will introduce Cyber Sandbox Creator, a tool for generating portable input files for building lightweight virtual environments using Vagrant and Ansible from a YAML definition of network topology. Cyber Sandbox Creator can be used for running hands-on exercises and training sessions locally deployed at a single desktop or laptop of each participant or for local development of sandboxes for full-fledged cyber ranges such as KYPO Cyber Range Platform.

Jan Vykopal (CyberSec4Europe)

Jan Vykopal is an assistant professor at Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. Jan received the PhD degree from Masaryk University, Brno, in computer systems and technologies in 2013 for network-based intrusion detection in high-speed networks. His current research interest is cybersecurity education, particularly active learning in cybersecurity using cyber ranges and virtual environments. Jan has been designing and organizing various cybersecurity games and exercises, including the Czech national defence exercise, since 2015.

Marketplace and Federation for Cyber Ranges

This short session will explain ECHO’s vision for federating cyber ranges to allow large and more sophisticated trainings and exercises to be delivered by collaborating parties. As well, it will explain ECHO’s vision for a marketplace where organizations, large or small, looking for enhancing their cyber capabilities can quickly find existing offerings from a large number of providers, and even request customized services.

Luc Dandurand (ECHO)

Luc Dandurand is the Head of Cyber Operations at Guardtime, where he leads the development of cyber range automation software, cyber exercises for critical infrastructure, and advanced cyber capabilities.

How we end up with a cyber-range

Brno University of Technology (BUT) has been teaching cybersecurity for five years now. Every year we tried to improve how the issue of cybersecurity is presented. For the first year of teaching, we used local virtual machines without the possibility of cooperation or attacks between students. In the second year, we started using virtual machines with different OS. In the third year, we started using vSphere hypervisors, which ran some scenarios. For the fourth year, we tried to combine all the advantages of individual solutions, until the cyber-range platform started to make sense to us. Currently, in the fifth year, we’d like to share our experience with deploying a cyber-range for university education.

Tomáš Lieskovan (SPARTA)

Tomáš Lieskovan works as a researcher at FEEC BUT. He is part of the Brno Applied Cryptography & Security Engineering group (AXE), mainly focused on security in smart grids and cyber-ranges. He is responsible for the technical solution of cybersecurity education.

Target audience

We are looking into engaging Europen cybersecurity professionals, representatives of national and European public institutions, and representatives of universities. If you are interested in cyber ranges, practical applications, and building cooperation, this webinar is just for you.