Environment Provisioning and Management for Cybersecurity Education

Abstract

Hands-on learning environments and cyber ranges are popular tools in cybersecurity education. These resources provide students with practical assessments to strengthen their abilities and can assist in transferring material from the classroom to real-world scenarios. Additionally, virtualization environments, such as Proxmox, provide scalability and network flexibility that can be adapted to newly discovered threats. However, due to the increasing demand for cybersecurity skills and experience, learning environments must support an even greater number of students each term. Manual provisioning and management of environments for large student populations can consume valuable time for the instructor. To address this challenge, we developed an Environment Provisioning and Management Tool for cybersecurity education. Our solution interacts with the exposed Proxmox API to automate the process of user creation, server provisioning, and server destruction for a large set of users. Remote access will be managed by a pfSense firewall. Based on our testing, a six-machine user environment could be provisioned in 14.96 seconds and destroyed in 15.06 seconds.