Developing a virtualised testbed environment in preparation for testing of network based attacks

Van Heerden, Renier; Pieterse, Heloise; Burke, Ivan; Irwin, Barry V W

Title: Developing a virtualised testbed environment in preparation for testing of network based attacks
Creator: Van Heerden, Renier, Pieterse, Heloise, Burke, Ivan, Irwin, Barry V W
Subject: To be catalogued
Date: 2013
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/429648
Identifier: vital:72629
Identifier: 10.1109/ICASTech.2013.6707509
Description: Computer network attacks are difficult to simulate due to the damage they may cause to live networks and the complexity required simulating a useful network. We constructed a virtualised network within a vSphereESXi environment which is able to simulate: thirty workstations, ten servers, three distinct network segments and the accompanying network traffic. The VSphere environment provided added benefits, such as the ability to pause, restart and snapshot virtual computers. These abilities enabled the authors to reset the simulation environment before each test and mitigated against the damage that an attack potentially inflicts on the test network. Without simulated network traffic, the virtualised network was too sterile. This resulted in any network event being a simple task to detect, making network traffic simulation a requirement for an event detection test bed. Five main kinds of traffic were simulated: Web browsing, File transfer, e-mail, version control and Intranet File traffic. The simulated traffic volumes were pseudo randomised to represent differing temporal patterns. By building a virtualised network with simulated traffic we were able to test IDS' and other network attack detection sensors in a much more realistic environment before moving it to a live network. The goal of this paper is to present a virtualised testbedenvironmentin which network attacks can safely be tested.
Format: 8 pages, pdf
Language: English
Relation: International Conference on Adaptive Science and Technology, van Heerden, R., Pieterse, H., Burke, I. and Irwin, B., 2013, November. Developing a virtualised testbed environment in preparation for testing of network based attacks. In 2013 International Conference on Adaptive Science and Technology (pp. 1-8). IEEE, International Conference on Adaptive Science and Technology volume 2013 number 1 1 8 2013 978-1-4799-3067-8
Rights: Publisher
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Irwin, Barry V W (Prof)

RU Department of Computer Science

SDG 09. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

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