A virtual environment for the enactment of realistic cyber security scenarios

In the last few years, cyber security has become a hot topic because of the ever-increasing availability of Internet accessible services driven by the diffusion of connected devices. The consequent exposition to cyber threats demands for suitable methodologies, techniques and tools allowing to adequately handle issues arising in such a complex domain. We argue that the flexibility of virtual environments will play a critical role in many cyber security related aspects. Problems like the assessment of newly devised intrusion detection techniques, the evaluation of skills of cyber defense team members, the evaluation of the disruptive effects caused by the diffusion of new malware, are just few examples of issues that cannot be directly addressed in production systems even though they require realistic operating environments in order to be suitably performed. This paper describes the architecture of SMALLWORLD, a scalable software platform designed to reproduce realistic scenarios achieved by the immersion of real systems into a software defined virtual environment.