Programmatic Description Language for Cyber Range Topology Creation

Abstract

Cyber Ranges are becoming a fundamental part of cybersecurity training and preparations, since they allow testing different scenarios in a safe, isolated and repro-ducible environment. We can expect to see cyber ranges used even more in cybersecurity trainings and testing of various system deployments, which also means increasing amount of scenarios to be developed. It is beneficial to make the scenario development/generation easier and faster for the human operators and automated generation alike to support the different use cases requirements. This paper analyses the currently available open-source and/or research community solutions for defining topologies for cyber ranges and presents the enhanced description language developed. The description language aims to sim-plify the scenario creation process for large networks with features that support quick and easy specification of the initial topology. This paper describes the enhanced features that enable the language to describe topologies in a compact form and presents initial test topology creation in lab settings deployed in OpenStack environment.